globetrotter and author of popular travel books; and General Friedrich von Bötticher, the only German military attaché who served in Washington, D.C., from 1933 to 1941. There were others who periodically informed Hitler about America, including Sven Hedin, the Swedish explorer who knew America well, Joachim Ribbentrop, his foreign minister, and various diplomatic officials, notably Hans Luther, Hans Dieckhoff, Ernst von Weizsäcker, and Hans Thomsen.
Compared to Franklin Roosevelt’s knowledge and firsthand experience of Germany and Europe, Hitler was at a considerable disadvantage. He had limited travel experience and spoke no foreign languages. Whatever travels Hitler undertook were dictated by political, or later military, circumstances. In early 1933 Roosevelt invited Hitler to America to discuss economic issues. Hitler declined, sending his economic minister, Hjalmar Schacht, in his place. It is interesting to speculate what these two leaders would have discovered about each other and how this might have changed their relationship. Often Hitler deliberately avoided face-to-face meetings with his major adversaries. Perhaps this is why he did not go to Washington or later to Moscow. He also deliberately turned down a meeting with Winston Churchill that Hanfstaengl had arranged in Munich in 1932. Hitler had a tendency to refrain from contact with people who held opposing views. The company of first-rate intellects made him uneasy; it brought out insecurities that stemmed from his obscure social origins in Austria. He frequently compensated for these insecurities through aggressive posturing or displays of his technical knowledge. Historians have had no trouble collecting many strange statements made by Hitler, including some about America and Americans. But this should not blind us to his brilliant political skills, including his ability to think and act pragmatically. He was far more unpredictable than historians have reported. Ernst Weizsäcker, state secretary in the Foreign Office, said that it was difficult to “see through” Hitler (schwer zu durchschauen) because he had an astonishing gift for dissimulation, making it difficult to tell whether he believed his own rhetoric or merely played a role, which he varied to fit particular people or occasions.6 Historians must be extremely careful when trying to distinguish between rhetoric and conviction, between Hitler’s visionary idealism and his brutal realism. In the case of America, he often employed the worst distortions, calling the United States a feeble country with a loud mouth while at the same time referring to it as an industrial colossus worthy of being imitated. He could belittle America in the vilest terms while at the same time eagerly looking at the latest photos from America, watching American films, and amusing himself with Mickey Mouse cartoons.
I intend to provide a more detailed and balanced account of Hitler’s view of the United States than the few older accounts we have on this subject. So many Hitler studies leave us feeling uncertain about the man’s character and convictions. Often the more we probe, the more elusive Hitler seems to become. He once told his close entourage that if he succeeded in his great plans, his name would be praised throughout the ages, but if he failed, his name would be cursed. Since the first possibility did not occur, we do not know whether it would have resulted in the apotheosis of the führer. It is highly unlikely. The fact that he failed led to exactly the outcome he feared; his name has not only been cursed but is associated with the embodiment of evil in history. The popular stereotype that depicts Hitler as a villainous character in a cheap melodrama, however, is misleading. For the sake of historical accuracy, it is important to steer clear of the snare of reductionism, of reducing all of Hitler’s actions to some common demonic denominator. No one is evil personified, except the devil, and even if someone were, it would not follow that such a person could not be extraordinarily gifted or brilliant. For historians, a degree of detachment, open-mindedness, and the awareness of existential contingencies are necessary elements in viewing the past.
Hitler was not a noble character. He was malignantly destructive. For this reason, Joachim Fest, citing an ancient dictum, denied that Hitler was a great hero, because repulsive moral beings are unfit to be called either great or heroic.7 Although Hitler may not have been a hero, he was a brilliant political Svengali who fundamentally shaped the twentieth century. His grandiose visions of establishing a Greater German Reich almost came to fruition in 1941. His hope was to match the industrial power of the United States, for in all other respects he thought that Germany was already superior. How he planned to do so, and what he thought of the United States, its people, leadership, culture, and way of life, is the subject of the following story. In this regard, it is important to mention that the book has deliberately been cast in narrative form because of my strong conviction that history is a storytelling art form rather than a social science that must imitate the natural sciences. All too many books about history nowadays are little more than retrospective sociology, front-loaded with theories and academic fads that are outmoded as soon as the books roll off the presses. I have a story to tell about Hitler and America, and I invite the reader to follow me through the narrative with as little distraction as possible. I believe that the narrative itself has cognitive value. Readers can make up their minds from the story itself, from the way I have cast it and from the explanations embedded in it. My own position about Hitler’s split image of America/Amerika serves as a guiding theme and is summarized at length in the conclusion. Along the way, readers will find surprising and even disturbing material about Hitler, Roosevelt, and the German-American relationship.
CHAPTER 1
Hitler’s Split Image of America
In February 1942, barely two months after he had declared war on the United States, Adolf Hitler praised America’s great industrial achievements, admitting that Germany would need some time to catch up. The Americans, he said, had shown the way in developing the most efficient methods of industrial production.1 This was particularly true in the iron and coal industries, which formed the basis of modern industrial civilization. He also touted America’s superiority in the field of transportation, especially in the automobile industry. Hitler loved automobiles and saw in Henry Ford a great hero of the industrial age. His personal train that took him from Berlin to his retreat at Berchtesgaden and later to the various military headquarters was code named “Amerika.”
It was not just America’s achievements in technological or industrial fields that made it a major world power, but also its superior workforce drawn from highly skilled Nordic immigrants. The European continent, he believed, had given its “best blood” to the New World, thus providing the growth gene for its civilization. In his view, it was a tragedy that the South had lost the American Civil War because it was in the Confederate states that racial policies had been more strongly institutionalized than in the Northern states. Hitler made favorable references in both Mein Kampf and a second, unpublished book to various racial policies pursued by the U.S. government. For example, he spoke highly of immigration quotas, racial segregation laws, and sound eugenic measures that he thought were more advanced in America than in Germany.
Hitler believed that America’s strength rested on two pillars: its powerful industrial capacity and its creative Nordic stock.2 On the one hand, as long as the United States preserved its Nordic blood, and even continued to replenish itself through European immigration, it would continue to be a major power in the world. If, on the other hand, America abandoned its racial policies, becoming an “international mishmash of peoples”3 it would quickly disintegrate as a unified nation. Until Hitler found himself seriously at odds with the United States in the late 1930s, he toned down grave doubts and prejudices he also harbored about “Amerika.”
This darker side of the American equation was an old European prejudice that multiethnic nations, lacking inner racial cohesion, could not function for long. Hitler doubted that the United States could fuse so many people of alien blood, because they were “stamped with their own national feeling or race instinct.”4 This was the accusation that America was a “mongrel nation,” as racially polluted as it was decadent and materialistic. Both prejudices were deeply rooted in European consciousness; and as Hitler came to blows with America, the negative stereotypes began to predominate. With the coming of World War II Hitler began to believe the worst stereotypes about America. In 1941 he told Mussolini, “I could not for anything in the world live in a country like the
