The Deterioration of German-American Relations
Toward the end of 1937, two apparently unrelated events revealed just how unfriendly relations between Germany and the United States had become. The first event centered on the sale of American helium to Germany. In May, the German Zeppelin airship Hindenburg had exploded at Lake hurst, New Jersey, probably as a result of static electricity and the highly flammable hydrogen the Germans had used in fueling the huge dirigible. If the Zeppelin Company had used nonflammable helium, which at the time was the exclusive monopoly of the United States, this disaster might have been avoided. Following the Lakehurst disaster, the Germans halted further construction of their hydrogen-fueled dirigibles and waited for U.S. deliveries of the nonflammable helium. In September 1937 Congress passed the Helium Act, authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to sell helium to foreign countries, with the proviso that the helium would not be put to military use. The Zeppelin Company promptly ordered 17,900,000 cubic feet of helium.
What happened next illustrates how low the relationship between Germany and the United States had sunk by late 1937 to early 1938, for the politics of helium went on for six months. When German tankers arrived in Houston to pick up the helium, a hitch developed. Although the navy had no objection to the transfer of the helium, the secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, did. Ickes refused to sign the contract for the sale of the helium, arguing that the Nazis should be punished for their aggressive actions. He specifically mentioned the “rape of Austria” as one of the reasons for denying the sale. The State Department deplored Ickes’s independent-minded action; in fact, Ambassador Wilson, Dodd’s successor in Berlin, warned that the denial of helium to a German company that was simply engaged in overseas passenger transportation was not only discriminatory but also would lead to further deterioration of relations with Germany. The president and his entire cabinet, however, eventually gave in to Ickes, especially after the U.S. solicitor general, Robert H. Jackson, ruled that the president had no authority over the matter and that Ickes’s negative vote was enough to block the sale.
Hitler played a minor role in the helium affair. He told Wiedemann that he had never liked Zeppelins, calling them “laughable blood sausages—lächerliche Blutwürste.”42 He said that they served no useful military purpose because they were slow and vulnerable. He was glad, he said, that he had not followed Goebbels’s advice to name the LZ.129 Zeppelin that exploded at Lakehurst the Adolf Hitler.43 Having the Adolf Hitler explode in America would have been harder to bear than the destruction of the Hindenburg. It goes without saying that Hitler suspected sabotage of the airship, as did most Germans in May 1937. According to Wiedemann, Hitler did plan to use some of the helium for military balloons (Fesselballons), which would, of course, have served military purposes.44 Perhaps Harold Ickes was right after all.
The second event that revealed the growing rift between Germany and the United States was not so much an event as it was a sign in the form of a memorandum. In mid-October 1937 the chief of the German Chancellery forwarded a memorandum to the Foreign Office with a note that said, “It is sent to you by his personal order.”45 The author of the memorandum, titled “Roosevelt’s America: A Danger,” was Baron Bernhard G. Rechenberg, a man who was no stranger to the Foreign Office. Rechenberg had been a director of the Reich’s foreign trade office in Hamburg, a post he quit under a financial cloud in 1924. He then went to the United States with his wife and children and made a living as a dairy farmer. He also became a propagandist for the Nazi cause in America, and after Hitler consolidated his dictatorship in 1934, Rechenberg decided to return to Germany. His ten years in America seemed to have left him none the wiser about the United States, for his lengthy memorandum was an overwrought warning that Roosevelt was about to plunge his country into a world catastrophe. Drawing on anti-Semitic and anti-American prejudices, Rechenberg claimed that Roosevelt was a terrible danger on two counts: he was a Jew and a Communist who would bring about “the fulfillment of the Communist Manifesto.”46 If not stopped, Roosevelt would pave the way toward the bolshevization of North America and the eventual globalization of the Communist menace. Members of the Foreign Office were scornful of this document; they denounced it not only as pure fantasy, as Ambassador Dieckhoff labeled it, but also as a complete distortion of American society. The diplomats undoubtedly hoped that Hitler would not take it as seriously as the comments accompanying the memorandum seemed to indicate. Ambassador Dieckhoff in Washington, who had received a copy of Rechenberg’s memorandum, wrote to Weizsäcker in Berlin that Germany could ill afford a conflict with the United States—a country that had grown much stronger since World War I, economic problems notwithstanding.
One month after the Rechenberg memorandum made the rounds of various government agencies, Hitler’s company commander in World War I and his personal adjutant since 1935, Fritz Wiedemann, went to the United States on an extensive tour that took him from New York to Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.47 In New York he had to brave a horde of American reporters and Communist protesters. He also met with members of the German American Bund in Chicago and was not impressed by what he saw. He later advised Hitler not to meet with Kuhn when the German-American Bund leader visited Germany. Wiedemann gained a good impression of the size and strength of the United States, but he could not help but notice the widespread antipathy toward the Nazi regime. When he returned to Germany, he undoubtedly reported to Hitler what he had seen and heard in America. What did Hitler make of all this?
Some historians have found it tempting to let Hitler play the deluded ideologue who, in this case, uncritically accepted Rechenberg’s biases because they confirmed his own.48 Wiedemann’s trip to America, however, was not just an innocent vacation but more likely a fact-finding mission that Hitler encouraged Wiedemann to undertake. In his memoirs, Wiedemann conveniently omitted the details about his trip and why he was allowed, or perhaps even urged, to go to the United States. After all, the arrival of the führer’s former company commander in America caused tongues to wag, and rightly so. What was the nature of his trip? Ostensibly a private visit, but then why was the führer’s personal aide accompanied by embassy officials throughout his trip? And why did he meet with German-American Bundists? It is quite possible that Hitler sent Wiedemann to America to get another point of view of conditions there. When Wiedemann returned and supposedly told Hitler to reach an understanding with the United States, Hitler dismissed him from his post because, as Wiedemann claimed, he could not abide people in his inner circle who disagreed with his politics. What kind of politics? Was it Hitler’s views of the United States? If this is so, why did Hitler in the same breath appoint Wiedemann as consul general to San Francisco? Historians have followed John W. Wheeler-Bennett’s acerbic judgment that Wiedemann was another casualty among the moderates who stood in the way of Hitler’s aggressive foreign policy. With some sense of Greek justice, Wheeler-Bennett said, he “exiled Wiedemann to San Francisco, where, as consul general he could practice his own theories of amicability with the Americans.”49 What Wheeler-Bennett does not mention is that, after Wiedemann’s return from his tour to America, he let everyone know that he wanted an appointment as consul general to San Francisco. Hitler, he admitted, had heard of his request and obliged by offering him the post as a kind of consolation for replacing him as his personal aide. Perhaps so, but it is my suspicion that Wiedemann’s account contains too many omissions to be completely believed. It could very well be that Hitler sent Wiedemann to the United States not only because his adjutant wanted to go there but also because he was the right man to tell the führer what was really going on in America. Bella Fromm, the prominent columnist for the Vossische Zeitung, who had a good nose for what was really going on in Berlin, recorded in her diary that “it is common knowledge in Berlin that the real purpose of his [Wiedemann’s] appointment to San Francisco is to spread Nazi propaganda in America. Also, from the West he would be able to direct German and Japanese espionage activities, for which his previous Japanese contacts adequately fit him.”50 While in San Francisco, Wiedemann was joined by his mistress, the notorious but fascinating Stephanie von Hohenlohe, whom the FBI described as a German spy, “worse than ten thousand men,” reputedly “immoral, and capable of resorting to any means, even to bribery, to gain her ends.”51 Hohenlohe
