was not a Mata Hari; in fact, her self-interest always trumped her loyalty to any nation. Although she was one-half Jewish, Hitler was much taken by her and greatly appreciated her social connections. Her relationship with Wiedemann was an on-and-off affair, as were so many of her liaisons with powerful men. The president told the Justice Department to have her deported. She managed to outwit them all.52
To summarize, Hitler was split about the United States; he wanted to hear the worst, but his political instincts told him that he could never underestimate the colossus across the ocean. It was best, therefore, to keep a tab on developments in America. In 1937 the United States was officially neutral, its military establishment was negligible, and its economy was worsening. Hitler’s most pressing concern was France and Britain, the two Western powers that could block his immediate designs on Austria and Czechoslovakia. Anyone who opposed him on this issue, especially cautious generals or timid diplomats, had to go. He made this position quite clear in his secret address to his military chiefs in November 1937 and acted on it in the new year. By that time Hitler had slipped through what Goebbels termed the “risky zone”; Roosevelt was beginning to stir behind his neutrality zone.
CHAPTER 3
Hitler’s Year: 1938
The Annexation (Anschluss) of Austria
At the height of the Austrian crisis, on March 8, 1938, a famous American visitor came to call on Adolf Hitler at the Reich chancellery—the former president of the United States, Herbert Hoover, who had been chauffeured from Prague to Berlin in a private automobile. Hoover, by profession an engineer, was very impressed by what he saw on his way to Berlin: splendid new highways, new housing developments, and prosperous towns and villages.1 In his hour-long conversation with Hitler, Hoover praised Germany’s economic prosperity and the prevailing mood of hopefulness throughout the nation. Although Hitler did most of the talking, he did not give the appearance of being a fanatic dictator. The conversation between the two statesmen was largely a “courteous exchange of opinion”;2 it centered on housing, employment, investment, and agriculture. Hoover remarked that the American people took a great interest in the new German experiment, which was quite different from the American version (Hoover was alluding to Roosevelt’s New Deal). He admitted that democratic rule had imposed a much slower pace on rebuilding America than Germany. This remark about democracy prompted Hitler to say that he had been democratically elected and enjoyed the full support of the German people. Hoover replied that the restrictive measures accepted in Germany would not work in America because of the importance the American people attached to spiritual and intellectual freedom. Hitler then shifted the conversation to the danger of Communism, which Hoover also acknowledged to be a serious problem. Hitler had always had an intuitive sense that the best way of ingratiating himself with men of Hoover’s class—the professional and industrial elites—was to appeal to their fear of Communism. The broad middle, or what Germans called Mittelstand, regarded Communism as a deadlier threat than Fascism. Most middle-class Germans, in fact, saw National Socialism as an acceptable alternative to the failed democracy that they held responsible for the postwar crisis. Although disenchantment with democracy was not a political problem in America, fear of Communism was, especially at the height of the Depression and among members of big business and believers in free-enterprise capitalism.
Following Hoover’s meeting with Hitler, a minor controversy arose over whether the two statesmen had clashed over the nature of democracy versus totalitarianism, but the American ambassador, Hugh Wilson, who had accompanied Hoover on his visit to Hitler, formally corrected the record by advising the State Department that there had been nothing in the nature of a clash in the interview. That afternoon, Wilson hosted a luncheon for Hoover, which was attended by high-ranking German officials and three foreign ambassadors, at the hotel Esplanade. In the evening the Carl Schurz Society gave a dinner in Hoover’s honor. Hjalmar Schacht, Germany’s “economic wizard” who was credited (wrongly) with pulling Germany out of the Depression, praised Hoover’s political career and expressed regret that the president could not complete his great work. The next day, Hoover was feted in grand style by Hermann Goering on his opulent estate. When Hoover finally got back to his Berlin hotel suite, he was visited by prominent members of German finance and industry.
The Germans were courting Hoover because they believed that he represented an important voice in the Republican Party—the isolationist wing that included Robert Taft, Robert La Follette Jr., Hiram Johnson, Burton Wheeler, Arthur Vandenberg, and others. Among these isolationists—or better put, noninterventionists—there was considerable respect for German efficiency and order. Some of these men, notably Charles Lindbergh, had no problem turning a blind eye to the excesses of the Nazi regime as long as it did not threaten the economic interests of the United States. As John Lukacs put it, “before 1938 there were many Americans who were inclined favorably to the new Germany, in spite (or, in some ways, because) of the barrage of news propagated about the brutalities of Hitler’s regime, thinking that that kind of propaganda was greatly exaggerated, the product of special interests.”3 Much of this changed after Hitler’s actions in 1938, especially his assault on the Jews in November 1938, but even then prominent American isolationists still wanted cordial relations with Germany. Lindbergh, Taft, and other followers of the America First movement continued to oppose Roosevelt’s efforts to commit the United States to a more active role in European affairs. They did so even after France had been defeated in 1940, opposing aid to Britain because it was not in the interests of the United States. Hoover had no illusions about Hitler, but he did not believe that it was in the interests of the United States to involve itself in European conflicts. For his part, Hitler judged Hoover to be a political small fry who could be useful in neutralizing American interventionism.4
What is particularly noteworthy about Hoover’s visit with Hitler is that it took place on the very day that Hitler got word that the Austrian chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, planned to checkmate Hitler in the political game of chess between German and Austria by proposing a plebiscite to the Austrian people, asking them whether they supported the idea of an independent and Christian Austria. As this chapter discusses later, a yes vote on Austrian independence would have thwarted Hitler’s plan to annex his native Austria. None of this filtered through to Hoover and his entourage. Hitler, Goering, and other German officials who were privy to what was happening in Austria put on a good show of normality at the time of the Austrian crisis.
The Austrian problem came to a head in early February 1938 when Hitler shook up his military, replacing recalcitrant commanders (Fritsch and Blomberg) with compliant ones (Keitel and Jodl); declared himself in personal command of Germany’s armed forces, and replaced the mild-mannered Konstantin von Neurath with the aggressive and unprincipled Joachim von Ribbentrop as foreign minister. The year 1938 was Hitler’s most successful year. That year witnessed one Hitlerean-inspired crisis after another: the annexation of Austria in March, the Czech crisis leading to the appeasement of Hitler in the summer and early autumn, and the horrors associated with the pogrom of German Jews in November. Austrians had strongly supported annexation with Germany in 1919, but the Allied powers decided to set aside their advocacy for democratic principles, because annexation of territories would strengthen rather than weaken postwar Germany. Hitler’s opening paragraphs in Mein Kampf made reference to his Austrian origins and his sincere conviction that “common blood belongs in a common Reich.”5 As in the cases of the Rhineland and the Saar, Hitler appealed to Wilsonian idealism as his ostensible modus operandi, arguing that he strongly believed in national self-determination for those Germans who had been separated from their fatherland by the Versailles treaty and were living as alien residents—marginalized, discriminated against, and disenfranchised—in Poland (Danzig and the Corridor), Czechoslovakia (the Sudetenland), France (the demilitarized Rhineland, the Saar, Alsace-Lorraine), Belgium (Moresnet, Eupen, Malmédy), and Denmark (northern sections of Schleswig). Hitler had the majority of German people behind him in demanding the return of these lost territories. It was particularly galling to the Germans, who were still filled with a powerful sense of mission and national destiny, that some of
