and other revisionists seemed to think, but a shift in his thinking about international aggression. At this point he was starting to realize that the American people needed to be educated about the threat from abroad, a reeducation that would not be easy because isolationist feelings were still very strong. On October 16, 1937, he sent his old headmaster at Groton, Endicott Peabody, a telegram thanking him for his support of the Quarantine speech and confessing, “As you know, I am fighting against a public psychology of long-standing—a psychology which comes very close to saying, ‘Peace at any price.’”38
This is what Roosevelt wanted to change, but he lacked an active policy to do it. Off the record, Roosevelt called Hitler an international gangster who would have to be stopped sooner or later. But who would stop him? Here Roosevelt’s intentions became murky. He was simply not the sort of man who wanted to rush into action without painstaking thought about the risks involved for the American people. Those who argue that he could hardly wait to horn in on the conflicts brewing in Europe or Asia, or perhaps that he even conspired to create incidents to justify intervention, do not understand the president’s essential style. The notion of giving aid and comfort short of war to the victims of totalitarianism became Roosevelt’s guiding policy until the fall of France. Roosevelt’s conception of national self-interest could be measured in geopolitical lines of defensive zones. In the Pacific it was the Philippines, Australia, India, and the oil-rich Dutch Indies. Next came French Indochina and Chiang Kai-shek’s China, both of which Roosevelt saw as bulwarks against Japanese expansion.
In Europe, Roosevelt’s first line of defense was Britain and France, the democratic allies of World War I. In the back of his mind there was the Soviet Union, an international pariah but an important potential ally against the mounting threat of Nazi Germany. In 1933 the Roosevelt administration formally recognized the Soviet Union and established full diplomatic relations with that Communist country. From the beginning of his presidency to the very end, Roosevelt took a somewhat benign view of the Soviet Union, did not seem overly perturbed by Soviet espionage in America, and courted and propped up the Soviet Union when it seemed on the verge of collapse in 1941.39 He made no intellectual connection about the equivalence of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union despite repeated warnings by his diplomats.
In 1937 Roosevelt recognized that events in Europe and Asia were beginning to be dangerous, and that ways and means had to be found to support the democracies, even if that meant chipping away—deceitfully, if necessary—at the wall of neutrality Congress had built since the early 1930s. While the American president talked of peace, the German dictator talked of aggression and war. Hitler’s timing was very good. By 1938 Germany had rearmed and was both militarily and psychologically at least as strong as the Western democracies. World War I had changed the traditional great power constellation, leaving a vacuum that Hitler was quick to exploit. Of the five major European powers before the war—Italy, Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, and Britain—only France and Britain had remained great powers. Weakened by revolution and civil war, Russia had fallen into the hands of the Bolsheviks, who were as suspicious of the democracies as they were of the Fascist states. The multiethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire had collapsed, and out of its scattered pieces emerged new national states such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. Italy was torn by socioeconomic conflicts and felt cheated of the fruits of victory, and Germany was defeated and humiliated. As to the United States, Americans had shown no inclination to assume the imperialist mantle that would have been necessary to keep the peace in Europe. If the United States had ratified the Versailles treaty, joined the League of Nations, and linked with the French and the British, Hitler—perhaps—could have been stopped. America’s wartime idealism turned out to be little more than an ideological justification for fighting the war; it had little effect in waging peace. This would have required a long-range commitment that Americans were not willing to make in 1919.
Hitler knew this. By themselves, Britain and France would not be able to prevent Germany from regaining great-power status. In fact, the leaders of the Weimar Republic, notably Gustav Stresemann, had already liberated Germany from the most crippling restrictions of the Versailles treaty; they had also, by default, if not complicity, allowed antidemocratic institutions a free pass. Hitler then inherited authoritarian and militaristic institutions: the armed forces, the courts, the civil service, and the school system. Hitler would bend these institutions to his will by Nazifying them. Germany had been the most powerful country on the continent in 1914, and the talents of its people enjoyed worldwide respect and envy. The war did not destroy the German potential for European supremacy, nor did it put a damper on the German obsession with gaining continental hegemony. Hitler merely gave voice to what the majority of Germans believed about themselves and their role in Europe. He believed, as they did, that Germany had never been defeated, had, in fact, been betrayed by allied promises of a just peace, and therefore had little choice but to shake off the shackles of Versailles to recoup its place among the great powers. What Hitler brought to the national atmosphere of self-pity and humiliation was a genius for tapping into that mood and converting it into a political mass movement that thrived on anger and revenge. Hitler also gave that movement an ugly racist and Judeophobic direction. He convinced all too many Germans that the Aryan race, being at the apex of biological and cultural evolution, was destined to dominate the world; and because Germany was the Urquelle (primal source) of Aryan strength, it was inevitable that the Germans would conquer Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals.40 The geography lesson Hitler gave the Germans was to link space and race. A people’s greatness did not lie in limiting itself to its own territorial boundaries but in expansion and conquest. This vision was the diametrical opposite of Roosevelt’s belief in peaceful coexistence, free markets, and democratic self-government. For Hitler, a nation’s greatness depended, in the first place, on producing a healthy racial stock and encouraging its members to reproduce prodigiously. In the second place, it meant weeding out inferior racial types through appropriate eugenic measures: preventive medicine, sterilization of people with hereditary or mental illnesses, hygienic institutes, and strict segregation of inferior breeds such as Jews and gypsies.
Finally, Hitler believed that to limit a growing people like the Germans to a small, limited space was to doom them to permanent vassalage to larger nations such as Russia, the United States, and China. This is why Hitler demanded living space (Lebensraum) for the German people in Eastern Europe. The vast spaces of Russia would be for Germany what the Wild West had been for the United States. Germany’s excess population would settle these areas and provide the fatherland with a permanent breadbasket, plus oil and other necessary materials for further industrialization. Hitler believed that making a geographically small nation into a world power could only be accomplished through the mobilization of all its resources by an all-powerful government. This task also required instilling warlike and aggressive habits into its people. Hitler wanted to breed a hard, callous, and obedient people who would do the bidding of the government. It was particularly the young that he expected to become as “swift as greyhounds and as hard as Krupp steel.” In his vulgarized Nietzschean perception, he wanted young people to delight in war and conquest. The chief educational goal of National Socialism was to teach all Germans the habit of being brutal with a clear conscience.
These views, and how Hitler wanted them translated into policy, were discussed in a secret conference on November 5, 1937, with his military and diplomatic chiefs—Werner von Blomberg, Werner von Fritsch, Erich Raeder, Hermann Goering, and Konstantin von Neurath.41 Hitler spoke at length, telling his chiefs about his plans to strengthen the German racial community by expanding its territories into Eastern Europe. He indicated that Germany could not solve its economic problems without territorial expansion and conquest. His immediate objective, he said, was the annexation of Austria and the destruction of Czechoslovakia in order to secure Germany’s eastern and southern flanks. The minutes of the conference were kept by Colonel Friedrich Hossbach and were later introduced as evidence at Nuremberg of Germany’s premeditated decision to wage a “war of aggression” on the world. This claim goes too far. The so-called Hossbach memorandum was more in the nature of a “testing of the waters” with his military chiefs than a blueprint for aggression. In fact, judging by their cautious, if not downright alarmed, responses, Hitler knew that he had to shake up his high command
