Erik Larson - In the Garden of Beasts

Phillips and fellow officials turned their attention to other matters. As would soon become apparent, however, Germany was not yet willing to let the matter drop.

THE SECOND DISTASTEFUL TASK that Dodd had to complete before his departure was to meet with Hitler. He had received an order from Secretary Hull directing him to convey to the chancellor America’s dismay at a burst of Nazi propaganda recently unleashed within the United States. Putzi Hanfstaengl arranged the meeting, which was to be private and secret—just Hitler and Dodd—and so, on Wednesday, March 7, shortly before one o’clock in the afternoon, Dodd once again found himself in the Reich chancellery making his way to Hitler’s office past the usual cadre of guards clicking and saluting.

First Dodd asked Hitler whether he had a personal message for Roosevelt that Dodd might deliver in person when he met with the president in Washington.

Hitler paused. He looked at Dodd a moment.

“I am very much obliged to you,” he said, “but this takes me by surprise and I wish you would give me time to think the subject over and let me talk with you again.”

Dodd and Hitler conversed a few moments about innocuous things before Dodd turned to the matter at hand—“the unfortunate propaganda which has been made in the United States,” as Dodd recounted in a memorandum he composed after the meeting.

Hitler “pretended astonishment,” Dodd wrote, and then asked for details.

Within the last ten days, Dodd told him, a Nazi pamphlet had begun circulating in the United States that contained what Dodd described as “an appeal to Germans in other countries to think themselves always as Germans and owing moral, if not political, allegiance to the fatherland.” Dodd likened it to similar propaganda distributed in the United States in 1913, well before America entered the past war.

Hitler flared. “Ach,” he snapped, “that is all Jewish lies; if I find out who does that, I will put him out of the country at once.”

With this the conversation veered into a broader, more venomous discussion of the “Jewish problem.” Hitler condemned all Jews and blamed them for whatever bad feeling had arisen in America toward Germany. He became enraged and exclaimed, “Damn the Jews!”

Given Hitler’s fury, Dodd thought it prudent to refrain from raising the subject of the mock trial, which would take place later that day, New York time. Hitler didn’t mention it either.

Instead, Dodd turned to how the Jewish situation might be resolved peacefully and humanely. “You know there is a Jewish problem in other countries,” Dodd told Hitler. Dodd proceeded to describe how the State Department was providing unofficial encouragement to a new organization established by the League of Nations under the direction of James G. McDonald, newly appointed high commissioner for refugees from Germany, to relocate Jews, as Dodd put it, “without too much suffering.”

Hitler dismissed it out of hand. The effort would fail, he said, no matter how much money the commission raised. The Jews, he said, would turn it into a weapon to “attack Germany and make endless trouble.”

Dodd countered that Germany’s current approach was doing great damage to the country’s reputation in America. Oddly, Dodd now sought to find a kind of middle ground with the dictator. He told Hitler, “You know a number of high positions in our country are at present occupied by Jews, both in New York and Illinois.” He named several “eminent fair-minded Hebrews,” including Henry Morgenthau Jr., Roosevelt’s secretary of the Treasury since January. Dodd explained to Hitler “that where the question of over-activity of Jews in university or official life made trouble, we had managed to redistribute the offices in such a way as not to give great offense, and that wealthy Jews continued to support institutions which had limited the number of Jews who held high positions.” Dodd cited one such example in Chicago and added, “The Jews in Illinois constituted no serious problem.”

Dodd in his memorandum explained: “My idea was to suggest a different procedure from that which has been followed here—of course never giving pointed advice.”

Hitler shot back that “59 percent of all offices in Russia were held by Jews; that they had ruined that country and that they intended to ruin Germany.” More furious now than ever, Hitler proclaimed, “If they continue their activity, we shall make a complete end to all of them in this country.”

It was a strange moment. Here was Dodd, the humble Jeffersonian schooled to view statesmen as rational creatures, seated before the leader of one of Europe’s great nations as that leader grew nearly hysterical with fury and threatened to destroy a portion of his own population. It was extraordinary, utterly alien to his experience.

Dodd calmly turned the conversation back to American perceptions and told Hitler “that public opinion in the United States is firmly convinced that the German people, if not their Government, are militaristic, if not actually warlike” and that “most people of the United States have the feeling that Germany is aiming one day to go to war.” Dodd asked, “Is there any real basis for that?”

“There is absolutely no basis,” Hitler said. His rage seemed to subside. “Germany wants peace and will do everything in her power to keep the peace; but Germany demands and will have equality of rights in the matter of armaments.”

Dodd cautioned that Roosevelt placed high importance on respect for existing national boundaries.

On that score, Hitler said, Roosevelt’s attitude matched his own, and for that he professed to be “very grateful.”

Well then, Dodd asked, would Germany consider taking part in a new international disarmament conference?

Hitler waved off the question and again attacked the Jews. It was they, he charged, who had promoted the perception that Germany wanted war.

Dodd steered him back. Would Hitler agree to two points: that “no nation should cross another nation’s boundaries and that all European nations should agree to a supervisory commission and respect the rulings of such a body?”

Yes, Hitler said, and did so, Dodd observed, “heartily.”

Later, Dodd wrote a description of Hitler in his diary. “He is romantic-minded and half-informed about great historical events and men in Germany.” He had a “semi-criminal” record. “He has definitely said on a number of occasions that a people survives by fighting and dies as a consequence of peaceful policies. His influence is and has been wholly belligerent.”

How, then, could one reconcile this with Hitler’s many declarations of peaceful intent? As before, Dodd believed Hitler was “perfectly sincere” about wanting peace. Now, however, the ambassador had realized, as had Messersmith before him, that Hitler’s real purpose was to buy time to allow Germany to rearm. Hitler wanted peace only to prepare for war. “In the back of his mind,” Dodd wrote, “is the old German idea of dominating Europe through warfare.”

DODD PREPARED FOR HIS VOYAGE. Though he would be gone two months, he planned to leave his wife, Martha, and Bill behind in Berlin. He would miss them, but he could hardly wait to get on that ship bound for America and his farm. Less cheery was the prospect of the meetings he would have to attend at the State Department immediately after his arrival. He planned to take the opportunity to continue his campaign to make the Foreign Service more egalitarian by confronting, directly, the members of the Pretty Good Club:

Undersecretary Phillips, Moffat, Carr, and an increasingly influential assistant secretary of state, Sumner Welles, another Harvard grad and a confidant of Roosevelt (a page, in fact, at Roosevelt’s 1905 wedding) who had been instrumental in crafting the president’s Good Neighbor policy. Dodd would have liked to return to America with some concrete proof that his approach to diplomacy—his interpretation of Roosevelt’s mandate to serve as an exemplar of American values—had exerted a moderating influence on the Hitler regime, but all he had accrued thus far was repugnance for Hitler and his deputies and grief for the lost Germany of his recollection.