to sail around all dangerous reefs. And when we were done, and well armed, better than they, and then they started the war.1
During the first few years Hitler took a rather cautious approach to foreign policy. He spoke of freedom and international peace while secretly preparing for rearmament and war. Hitler performed this deception so well that many people, inside and outside of Germany, fooled themselves about his real intentions. The new German government tried to establish cordial relations with the United States, and initially Roosevelt also adopted a wait-and-see attitude. On January 30, the day Hitler assumed power, the New York Times correspondent in Berlin reported that “Herr Hitler is reported to be in a more docile frame of mind.” Just one day later that same New York Times reporter opined that “Hitler Puts Aside Aim to be Dictator,” a form of wishful thinking that was also widely indulged in by conservative circles in Germany. Roosevelt reserved judgment, undoubtedly hoping that political experience would moderate the German leader. His selection of William E. Dodd, a professor of history at the University of Chicago who had received his Ph.D. from the University of Leipzig in 1900, as ambassador to Germany in 1933 was probably motivated by the president’s desire to use the liberal professor as a conduit to the moderate, old-school elements in German society and public life.2 Dodd was a distinguished professor of history and an old-style liberal who believed that “he could have some influence in moderating the policies of the Nazi regime.”3 A Jeffersonian and a Wilsonian internationalist, he shared with FDR, whom he greatly admired, a faith in the basic decency of human nature and a universal desire on the part of people for democratic freedom. His view of Germany was an illusionary and romantic image of prewar Germany, commonly held by Americans of his generation. Dodd showed considerable sympathy for what Germans had gone through during the war and after, and deplored the humiliation the country had suffered as a result of the Versailles Treaty, political instability, and economic chaos. As he set off for Germany with his wife and two grown children, he was hopeful that he could play an important part in bolstering the forces of moderation, mistakenly believing that the Germans were by “nature more democratic than any other great race in Europe.”4 With blinders such as these, Dodd was in for a shock, and he quickly discovered just how brutal the new Nazi government really was. Instead of exercising his role as an objective diplomat, Dodd allowed himself to become so emotionally involved in what he saw that it undermined his diplomatic effectiveness. He took a visceral dislike to Hitler, confiding to his diary, “I have a sense of horror when I look at the man.”5 Hitler returned the compliment, calling Dodd an old imbecile (alter Trottel) whose bad German he could never really understand.6 Dodd’s good-looking daughter, Martha, became so intimately entangled with various Nazis that her father feared that her behavior might lead to a serious diplomatic scandal. Dodd had good reason to be concerned, but not in the way he thought. His daughter later married a Czech, became a Soviet agent, and chose to live behind the Iron Curtain after World War II. Hitler blamed the men of the Foreign Office for missing an opportunity to get to Dodd through his “accessible daughter.”7
Dodd served for four and a half years (1933–38), witnessing the excesses of the Nazi regime at close range and sending some rather telling accounts of what he saw to Washington. His correspondence with Roosevelt is particularly intriguing, for it reveals that both men, though slightly blinded by their liberal misconceptions of Germany, sensed very early on just what kind of threat Hitler represented to Europe and therefore potentially to the United States. FDR asked Dodd to accomplish three goals as ambassador: to press the Germans for repayment on all private American loans; to help moderate persecution of the Jews; and to influence trade arrangements on certain items in order to facilitate German debt payments to the United States.8 Dodd failed on all three counts, but this was hardly his fault. No American diplomat could have deflected Hitler from his single-minded goal, to expand German power. At the same time, Dodd was surely the odd man out in Berlin: a moderate academic who hated diplomatic niceties and lavish parties, who had great difficulty in conforming to the Washington bureaucracy, and who took a deep dislike to the people he was supposed to get along with. For this reason, Franklin Ford’s judgment of him was surely right: Dodd was “ineffectual as an ambassador less because he failed to achieve his aim of changing the Third Reich by example and persuasion than because that was the aim he set himself.”9 Once Dodd became fully aware of his failure, he became despondent and psychologically incapable of representing his country during the various grave crises into which the Nazis plunged Europe—the Röhm purge, German rearmament, the annexation of Austria, the Czech crises, and the Crystal Night pogrom against the Jews.
During the first two years of Nazi rule, U.S.-German relations were, if not warm, at least diplomatically correct. The State Department did not want to pick a fight with the new German government and hoped that Hitler would not last too long or would moderate his aggressive policies. The German Foreign Office, in turn, scrupulously tried to avoid any hostility with the United States. In April 1933 Roosevelt, concerned over German loan repayments, even invited Hitler to Washington; the führer sent Hjalmar Schacht, president of the Reich Bank, instead.10 In 1933 parallels were often drawn between the New Deal and National Socialist economic policies. John Cudahy, Roosevelt’s ambassador to Poland, stopped in Berlin before assuming his post in Warsaw and reported back to the president that the Nazis were harmless. His sense was that there was a new “patriotic buoyancy and unity in the new Germany.” As to the Brownshirts (SA), they merely represented an “outlet for the peculiar social need of a country which loves display and pageantry.”11 He seemed to believe that the brownshirts were a kind of fraternal order, like the Elks in America. On the German side, the Völkische Beobachter, the official organ of the Nazi Party, commented positively on Roosevelt’s new book Looking Forward (1933), translated almost immediately into German, by admitting that many statements in this book could have been written by a National Socialist. The Beobachter even claimed that “Roosevelt has a good deal of understanding for National Socialist thought.”12 Between 1933 and 1936, Hitler made no recorded anti-American remarks.13 In 1934 Roosevelt and Hitler actually exchanged cordial messages. In one of them Hitler praised the American president for the outstanding work he was doing in leading his country toward economic recovery. Hitler congratulated FDR on his “heroic efforts” on behalf of the American people and expressed his agreement with the president’s view that the “virtue of duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline should dominate the entire people.”14 Roosevelt remarked to Harold Ickes at the time, “What we are doing in this country are some of the things … that are being done under Hitler in Germany. But we are doing them in an orderly way.”15
In reviewing Hitler’s first year in office, American magazines drew two exaggerated images of Hitler, focusing on his Charlie Chaplin–like appearance on the one hand and his dictatorial megalomania on the other hand. Time magazine showed Hitler in a somewhat more favorable light by covering his generosity toward his former wartime comrade Ignaz Westenkirchner, who asked for Hitler’s help in rescuing him from depression-ridden America. Westenkirchner had immigrated with his family to Reading, Pennsylvania, after the war, but the Depression had left him unemployed, so he asked Hitler for help. Hitler not only sent tickets but also lined up a position for him as superintendent of a Nazi Party building in Munich. Time magazine quoted Westenkirchner as saying that Hitler was “a kind man” who deeply cared for the poor, raising them up without permitting the upper classes to be leveled.16 Time followed up the Westenkirchner rescue mission with another “kind Adolf” story several months later. This one involved Anton Karthausen, a German immigrant who was unable to make a living as a dressmaker in Brownsville, Texas. Hitler promptly responded with tickets that enabled the Karthausens to return to Germany. These repatriation efforts were good propaganda for the Germans; they were intended to show that Germans belonged back home and that America was not the land of opportunity it was rumored to be.
References to “kind Adolf” changed drastically in 1934. The bloody Röhm purge of 1934, along with Nazi attacks on the churches and party-sponsored book burnings, soured American public opinion of Germany because it revealed the brutal nature of the Nazi system. General Hugh Johnson, head of the National Recovery Administration, went on
