Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

Armstrong was reluctant to give in completely to pessimism—something that he noted with a tinge of regret in his memoirs, since if he had done so he would have been proven completely vindicated by events. But the main import of his slim treatise was clear: Hitler’s Germany was stirring up real fears for good reason—and anyone who downplayed the dangers was dangerously self-delusional.

In early 1933, shortly after Hitler had taken power in Germany, another new leader appeared on the world scene: Franklin D. Roosevelt. Coming to power in the midst of the Great Depression, he was understandably preoccupied with his domestic agenda. In his inaugural address on March 4, 1933, the same day that the Nazis won the most seats in the Reichstag elections, he focused on the need for national recovery, only making a brief mention of “world policy” during which he pledged that the United States would be “the good neighbor.”

But Roosevelt faced an almost immediate decision about whom to send to replace Sackett, Herbert Hoover’s envoy to Germany whose tour ended in late March. Despite the pull of his domestic agenda, Roosevelt understood that this was an increasingly important post and sought to fill it with someone who would have a chance of playing a constructive role there. He first offered the job to James M. Cox, who had been the Democratic presidential candidate in 1920 and shared the ticket with FDR as his running mate. “I regard Berlin as of special importance at this time,” Roosevelt wrote him, imploring him to accept the post. Cox turned him down, citing his need to attend to his business interests, including his publishing company. The president was no more successful in his subsequent overtures to former Secretary of War Newton Baker, businessman Owen D. Young and a couple of prominent New York politicians.

While he struggled to find a new Berlin envoy, Roosevelt signaled his intent to pursue a global disarmament agenda. On May 16, he appealed to world leaders to begin scrapping all offensive weapons and to pledge not to engage in acts of aggression. The next day, Hitler appeared at the Reichstag to deliver his own “Peace Speech.” Calling the American president’s proposal “a ray of comfort for all who wish to co-operate in the maintenance of peace,” Hitler professed his country’s willingness to renounce all offensive weapons and “to disband her entire military establishment” if her neighbors would do the same thing. War was “unlimited madness,” he added, calling for an end to old enmities and insisting that Germany was ready to live in peace with everyone.

“The speech was the best thing I have heard Hitler do,” Lochner wrote to his daughter Betty afterward. He had presided over the AP bureau’s extensive coverage of the event, and he was still feeling optimistic when he wrote his letter on May 28. The Nazis would have been furious if any Weimar chancellor had delivered such a conciliatory speech, he added. “That’s the interesting thing about dictatorships, anyway: When it comes to foreign policy, they are tame as lambs… for they know they have so much trouble consolidating their power at home that they want to avoid everything possible that might look like trouble with foreign nations. It is quite obvious that Hitler doesn’t want war.”

Lochner wasn’t completely credulous. “Whether, however, when you instill the military traditions in a people, war won’t come anyway, is another question. Certainly, Germany looks like an armed camp,” he wrote, mentioning the proliferation of uniformed Nazis, paramilitary units and police. “Hitler had to explain that the ‘Private Armies’ are harmless ping-pong affairs!”

Despite the generally positive coverage Hitler’s speech received, Roosevelt was hardly sanguine about relations with Germany and continued to be frustrated by his inability to recruit someone for the Berlin post. But he perked up immediately when, at a meeting on June 7, Secretary of Commerce Daniel Roper suggested his friend William E. Dodd. A professor of history at the University of Chicago who specialized in the Old South, Dodd was born in North Carolina, studied at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and then went on to get a doctorate at the University of Leipzig. Dodd, who was sixty-three, was both a Democratic partisan and “a democrat in the full American sense of the word,” noted fellow historian Charles A. Beard. Beard added that Dodd was a Baptist who believed in “separation of Church and State, religious liberty and freedom of conscience.”

The very next day, Roosevelt called Dodd at his University of Chicago office. “I want to know if you will render the government a distinct service,” he told the startled professor. “I want you to go to Germany as Ambassador.”

When Dodd recovered from the initial shock, he asked for some time to think the proposition over. “Two hours; can you decide in that time?” Roosevelt persisted, adding that he was sure the German government would not object to a book he had written about Woodrow Wilson or any of his other writings. “That book, your work as a liberal and as a scholar, and your study at a German university are the main reasons for my wishing to appoint you. It is a difficult post and you have cultural approaches that would help. I want an American liberal in Germany as a standing example.”

Dodd quickly called his wife and talked with university officials, but there was little doubt in his mind what his answer would be. Suddenly, he had received an offer to be a participant in history, not just an observer. Besides, as his daughter Martha pointed out later, the call from the president aroused “an almost sentimental nostalgia for the Germany of his youth, the country that had opened up the tremendous cultural horizons to him, softened his heart by the kindness and generosity of its people, both simple and educated.” Dodd had criticized the harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty when it had been unpopular to do so, and he had admired the attempt by the Weimar-era politicians to construct a democratic system.

If both Roosevelt and his appointee were inclined to believe that a cultured, liberal, democratic American ambassador might have a salutary effect on relations with Germany, they knew that they couldn’t expect miracles. Over lunch at the White House on June 16, the president discussed trade and financial issues, and then turned to the question of the Jews. “The German authorities are treating the Jews shamefully and the Jews in this country are greatly excited,” he said. “But this is also not a governmental affair. We can do nothing except for American citizens who happen to be made victims.”

At the beginning of July, Dodd met with a group of prominent New York Jews, who appealed to him to do what he could to defend their persecuted brethren in Germany. While explaining that he could not intervene officially, he vowed to “exert all possible influence against unjust treatment of German Jews.” But during another call in New York, Dodd received a dramatically different message. Philanthropist Charles R. Crane, who had endowed a chair at the University of Chicago’s history department and also funded the Institute of Current World Affairs, discussed both his hatred of Russia’s Bolsheviks and his admiration for the new regime in Germany, including its treatment of the Jews. “Let Hitler have his way,” Crane advised Dodd.

Little wonder that Dodd boarded the Washington , the ship that would take him, his wife and their grown children Bill and Martha to Hamburg, in a serious mood. He was still excited by this unexpected new opportunity but recognized that Roosevelt’s description of Berlin as “a difficult post” was certainly an understatement. He would have to deal with the Nazis and professional foreign service officers who had a reputation for snobbishness, and he had to try to resurrect his German language skills that had atrophied since his student days. As the ship prepared to depart, a group of New York newspapermen asked Dodd and his family to pose for photos on the front deck. As the new envoy noted sheepishly in his diary, “My wife, son and I yielded reluctantly and, unaware of the similarity of the Hitler salute, then unknown to us, we raised our hands.” The last image of the departing appointee, then, was one of him and his family seemingly mimicking the Nazi salute.