A Sense of the Enemy: The High Stakes History of Reading Your Rival's Mind (16 page)

Even at this early point in Dodd’s time in Berlin, the Ambassador was recognizing Hitler’s deceitfulness. Dodd wrote the President: “I am sorry to have to say this of a man who proclaims himself the savior of his country and assumes on occasion the powers of President, the legislature, and the supreme court. But you know all this side of the matter: June 30 and July 25!”
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Dodd was referring to Hitler’s failed attempt to annex Austria on July 25, 1934. Obviously, Dodd understood that FDR grasped at least some of the significance of Hitler’s June 30 purge as well as the Führer’s aggressive intentions abroad. Ten days later, Roosevelt took the time to reply to Dodd’s letter. The President agreed that the “drift in Germany was definitely downward.” He expected something to break within the next six months to a year. FDR concurred with Dodd’s pessimism about Europe, but he stressed that he looked for any ray of hope, though he saw no signs of it at present.
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By September, the President was fully aware of the growing police state that Hitler had erected. At a press conference in Hyde Park, FDR commented on a report from Dodd that the many secret services—those obedient to Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, and the Reichswehr—were all following each other around. The President wryly remarked that in order to retain their power, someone would probably have to march on some border. At that point, the only way to know which border it would be was to toss a coin.
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In November, Dodd again summarized his impressions of rising German militarism in a cable to Assistant Secretary of State R. Walton Moore, which Moore forwarded to the President. Dodd observed that Hitler Youth and SA men were marching in every town he visited. In Bayreuth the Ambassador could not sleep because the marching and singing kept him awake all night.
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Dodd noted intense smokestack activity, suggesting that poison gas and weapons were being manufactured at full speed. A great many German men were being trained to fly, far more than would normally be needed. Dodd’s overall impression was that the German public was becoming exceedingly militarized: “The result of all this, if allowed to go through, will of course mean annexations and predominance of the whole of Europe.” Dodd qualified his conclusion by stressing that he was not predicting that
this would definitely occur, only that the signs clearly pointed in that direction.
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By May of 1935, Dodd’s direct reports to Roosevelt were assuming a more alarming pitch. Germany now possessed, he stated, more than a million young men expertly trained in everything except the handling of the most modern guns. Its airfields were expansive, modern, and equipped by underground storage areas. The manufacture of arms, tanks, and poison gas was continuing day and night. When Dodd asked one admiral what Germany would do in two years’ time when it possessed the greatest military in Europe, the admiral bluntly said, “Go to war.” Dodd further observed that although Hitler constantly reiterated his peaceful aims, he had placed well-drilled police units along the Rhine’s demilitarized zone. Dodd frankly informed the President: “While I do not think the Chancellor will wish to make a war before May 1937 or ’38, I believe I am right in saying that it is a fixed purpose. Such is the view of every leading diplomat here.”
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In mid-September of 1935, the Nazi Party held a mass rally at Nuremberg. It was there that the regime outlined what came to be known as the Nuremberg Laws, a set of anti-Jewish legal codes that formalized discrimination. Ambassador Dodd cabled Hull with summaries of the speeches delivered by Hitler and other Party leaders. Roosevelt wanted to know more. On September 23, Dodd hosted a luncheon in the American embassy for a handful of guests. Among the invitees was Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, Minister of Economics and a prominent conservative economist of the old school. Schacht had helped steer Germany back to financial health in the 1920s when Gustav Stresemann was working to restore German strength through its foreign relations. At one point during the luncheon, Dodd took Schacht aside with a special request. President Roosevelt desired that Schacht speak privately with American representative S. R. Fuller, Jr. Via Fuller, FDR wanted to glean Schacht’s views on Europe’s and especially Germany’s trajectory, yet the subjects they discussed were not limited to economics.

Fuller invited Schacht to speak freely. Presumably they were safe from surveillance in the library of the American embassy. Schacht did not hold back. He praised Hitler for his moral courage and his achievements uniting the German people. Schacht insisted that Hitler did not seek dictatorship but instead was pursuing policies through democratic
means. And then Schacht himself brough the conversation to the Jews, explaining to Fuller that the Jews and Roman Catholics historically had been a domestic problem for many states in Europe.

Fuller observed that Germany’s treatment of the Jews was resented in many countries. The new Nuremberg Laws, he noted, deprived the Jews of their citizenship. Schacht conceded this, but he defended the laws, stating that the Jews were fully protected as any other minority. Fuller pressed the point. “And their positions by these laws is an inferior one to the Germans?” Fuller asked. “Yes,” Schacht replied, “that must always be.”
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Fuller then asked what would happen if the Jewish people refused to accept their inferior status. Schacht simply shrugged his shoulders and replied that he did not know what would result.

The discussion turned to economic matters for a time, before touching again on politics. Schacht declared that Hitler stood closely with the army and that the army supported Hitler unreservedly, seeing Hitler as a necessity for them and for the nation. When Fuller asked at last what part of their discussion he wished Fuller to share with President Roosevelt, Schacht emphatically responded, “Everything. You can tell the President everything I have said.”
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Clearly, by late 1935, in the wake of the Nuremberg Laws, FDR felt it necessary to understand the German Chancellor. Roosevelt’s private, back-door channel to Schacht offered the President a further glimpse into the racist mood within Germany, as well as the surprising degree of support for Hitler’s agenda, even from an old-school conservative like Schacht. And yet, the President understood that Nazi control over German media and society severely inhibited both free speech and free thought. At the start of December, he wrote Dodd that while he could not guarantee that America could save civilization, he at least hoped that the United States could, by example, encourage freedom of thought. “The trouble is,” FDR added woefully, “that the people of Germany, Italy and Japan are not given the privilege of thinking.”
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Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, marked another pattern break in which Hitler imposed costs upon himself and thereby revealed something about his underlying aims. Spearheaded by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels in close collaboration with Hitler, the sudden surge in anti-Jewish violence on November 9, 1938, shocked observers within and beyond German borders. Perhaps the most unsettling
aspect was the episode’s medieval character: rampaging mobs bent on mayhem, brutality, and murder. More than 100 Jews died during the savagery, while many more tried to commit suicide as an escape. Gangs broke into Jewish homes, stabbed the occupants to death, and looted at will. More than 8,000 Jewish-owned businesses were vandalized, more than 100 synagogues were destroyed, and hundreds more were burned. Jewish-owned property lined the streets, smashed, torn, and shattered. The estimated cost of this one night ranged in the hundreds of millions of marks.
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The horror of Kristallnacht made an unalloyed impression on FDR. Roosevelt felt it necessary to make a public statement in response to these events. Hull provided a draft of the official remarks, which Roosevelt used almost verbatim. There was one notable addition, which affords a glimpse into how FDR had come to view Hitler and the Nazi regime. In his own hand, the President inserted the words: “I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth century civilization.”
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FDR recalled the American Ambassador from Berlin to provide him with a firsthand account of events across Germany. If there had been any question before this point as to the nature of Nazi rule, there could be little doubt thereafter. Five days later, on November 14, Roosevelt and senior administration officials, including George Marshall, met in the White House to discuss the dramatic expansion of American air power. At that time, the Army’s Air Corps possessed a mere 160 warplanes and 50 bombers. The officials debated the merits of constructing 10,000 new warplanes.
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Kristallnacht was not the cause of this proposed expansion—an accurate assessment of Hitler’s aggressive nature was.
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The historian Ian Kershaw has argued that Hitler’s anti-Jewish mania was linked to his ambition for war. “If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed once more in plunging the nations into a world war,” Hitler declared, “the result will be not the Bolshevism of earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”
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Mein Kampf
revealed Hitler’s intimate intertwining of Jews and Bolshevism. What Kristallnacht revealed was Hitler’s inability to restrain his anti-Jewish, anti-Bolshevist obsession, even at a time when he sought international acquiescence to his plans for territorial expansion. The Munich Agreement had been concluded merely one month earlier. Hitler still hoped to persuade foreign leaders
of his peaceful and just intentions, yet Kristallnacht undermined that aim. A hardened realist would never have permitted Kristallnacht to occur at so sensitive a time. On November 9, Hitler’s racism collided with his realism, and his realism was momentarily pushed aside.
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Once war came in September 1939, American entry became a British objective and the isolationists’ nightmare. By early 1940, Roosevelt needed to gain a clearer sense of Hitler’s aims. The President also had to prepare to win a third term. To accomplish both these ends, FDR dispatched his most trusted advisor in the Department of State, Sumner Welles, to Berlin. Welles’s mission was to gauge Hitler’s more immediate intentions as well as the Führer’s longer-term goals.

Although FDR did not expect to broker a peace deal at this late date, he did hope to buy England and France a bit more time. If Welles could draw Hitler into negotiations, this could at least allow for more supplies to reach the British Isles. But Hitler was far too clever and determined to allow himself to be ensnared. On February 29, 1940, he issued a memorandum to all officials scheduled to meet with Welles. Under no circumstances were they to give Welles the impression that Germany was interested in discussing peace.
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For Welles’s part, he imagined that he might create a wedge between the Duce and the Führer and thereby prevent a world war, but this too had little chance of succeeding.

At noon on March 1, Welles first met with Joachim von Ribbentrop, a former champagne salesman who possessed disturbingly little aptitude for diplomacy. After years of wrangling with his predecessor, in 1938 Ribbentrop finally displaced Konstantin Freiherr von Neurath as German Foreign Minister. Although he managed to alienate most traditional diplomats, he did succeed in negotiating the now infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, forging an alliance with Soviet Russia and enabling the Second World War to begin. Still, even the Soviets who had dealt with him had a hard time taking him seriously. “Those hips,” Andrei Zhdanov had exclaimed once the pact was sealed. “He’s got the biggest and broadest pair of hips in all of Europe.”
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Welles would find nothing to joke about. He saw the Foreign Minister as an utterly distasteful presence. Given Ribbentrop’s icy reception, that was no surprise.

Welles was immediately struck by the Wilhelmstrasse’s untraditional atmosphere. Every Foreign Ministry official dressed in military uniform.
Nazi stormtroopers guarded the halls, just past the two sphinxes outside the Foreign Minister’s office, the eerie remnants of Bismarck’s era.

Ribbentrop held forth for two hours straight, pausing occasionally to allow the interpreter to translate. He spoke with eyes closed while he lectured on about the aggression of England and the unlikelihood of peace. Welles thought the Foreign Minister imagined himself some kind of Delphic Oracle. Welles let FDR know exactly what he thought of Ribbentrop, describing him as “saturated with hate for England,” “clearly without background in international affairs,” and “guilty of a hundred inaccuracies in his presentation of German policy during recent years.” Welles concluded that he had rarely met anyone he disliked more.

The conversation did touch briefly on human rights. Welles raised the issue of humanitarian conditions, clearly with the plight of the Jews in mind. Ribbentrop suggested that Welles should spend a little time in Germany; then he would see for himself just how good the German people had it. Germany had become a nation of “enthusiastic, happy human beings. . . .” This was “. . . the humane work to which the Führer had devoted his life.”
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