A Sense of the Enemy
Page 12
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.”9
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.”10 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.”11
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.”12
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.13
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.”14 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.15 Kristallnacht was not the cause of this proposed expansion—an accurate assessment of Hitler’s aggressive nature was.16
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.”17 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.18
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.19 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.”20 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.”21
If Ribbentrop proved a brick wall, Welles gleaned even less from Rudolph Hess, Hitler’s deputy in the Nazi Party—a man whom Welles found exceedingly stupid. Hess never deviated from his script and gave the impression of an automaton. Four other meetings did, however, reveal at least a hint of Hitler’s thinking and internal government dynamics. Ernst von Weizsacker, Welles’s counterpart in the German Foreign Ministry and a traditional Weimar-era diplomat, revealed much when he explained that he had been strictly instructed not to discuss any subject relating to peace. That admission underscored the remoteness of establishing any last-ditch settlement. Then Weizsacker pulled his chair toward the center of the room and wordlessly indicated that Welles should do the same. The Nazi security service was listening, always, and every official had to operate under the weighty pall of surveillance. Welles asked if he thought that Mussolini might persuade the Führer to negotiate a settlement. Weizsacker felt that Ribbentrop would try to block any such attempt. As they parted, Weizsacker became teary-eyed, telling Welles that he hoped there might be a way that “an absolute holocaust could be avoided.”22
At 11:00 on the following morning, officials arrived at Welles’s hotel to escort him to the Chancellery. The Führer would grant him an audience. Inside the great marble hall, tapestries and sofas lined the corridors. Welles was ushered into a waiting room until Hitler was ready to see him. The Chancellor greeted Welles formally but pleasantly. Hitler looked fit, and taller than Welles had imagined. Throughout almost the whole of their meeting Hitler spoke eloquently in a calm and dignified demeanor. Though Welles could not have known it, that same day Hitler had issued orders to the Wehrmacht to prepare for an invasion of Denmark and Norway.23
Welles explained that he came as the representative of the President of the United States and that he would report only to the President and Secretary of State. He had no specific proposals, but he hoped to determine whether stability on the continent remained possible. “Was it not worth every effort to seek the way of peace,” Welles asked Hitler, “before the war of devastation commenced and before the doors to peace were closed?” Such a peace, Welles explained, must include a contented and secure German people but also an international community that did not view Germany as a threat. Asked if the Chancellor could affirm that a possibility for peace still existed, Hitler quietly detailed his foreign policy over the previous seven years, exactly as Ribbentrop had done the day before. Welles had the distinct impression that every Nazi official he met with had been instructed to stick to the identical script.
Welles attempted to engage Hitler in a discussion of Germany’s long-term economic interests, arguing that no country could benefit more than Germany from the resumption of liberal trade relations. Hitler said that the nations of central and southeastern Europe needed to purchase German industrial products (of the kind that those countries could not themselves produce), while Germany could import those nations’ raw materials. Trade with the United States was not his priority. Welles countered that German luxury goods would not find markets in central and southeastern Europe, as those populations could not afford them. Only advanced economies such as the United States could provide sufficient consumers. War would disrupt Germany’s best hopes of economic growth. Welles was trying to reason with the Führer by assuming that economic interests were one of his primary concerns. Either he did not grasp Hitler’s underlying drivers, or he simply wanted to draw the Chancellor out in hope that he would reveal what he truly wanted. In part, Hitler did reveal himself.
Hitler replied that he had three aims: historical, political, and economic, in that order. Germany had once been an empire. It was the German people’s right to demand that their historical position be returned to them. This much of Hitler’s assertions was a true reflection of his aims, to restore a German Empire. The rest of what he told Welles was not simply false; it was also contrary to what he had written in Mein Kampf. Hitler assured Welles that Germany had no desire to dominate non-German peoples, only to ensure that they posed no security threat. Finally, he insisted on the return of German colonies taken by the Versailles agreement, as Germany needed them for their raw materials and as places for German emigration. In Mein Kampf, Hitler had argued that Germans required not colonies but contiguous land for food production and emigration. He now told Welles that, compared to the United States, Germany had to produce ten times the amount of food per square kilometer. Because of its population density, Germany, he insisted, needed Lebensraum in order to feed itself.24 He did not remind Welles what he had written on this subject in Mein Kampf, that strong peoples take what they need by force, as this was the natural order of things. Equally telling in Hitler’s comments was what he did not say. He avoided any reference to the Soviet Union—an omission that Welles noted in his report.
As the meeting drew to a close Hitler remarked, “The German people today are united as one man, and I have the support of every German.” There could be no hope for peace, he declared, until the English and French will to destroy Germany was itself destroyed. He assured Welles that Germany was strong enough to prevail. If it were not, then “we would all go down together . . . whether that be for better or worse.” Welles expressed the fleeting hope that if peace could be found, then no nation would need to go down. Hitler assured Welles that Germany’s aim, whether through war or otherwise, was a just peace. On that note, their meeting ended.
If Welles and Roosevelt hoped to gauge Hitler’s underlying drivers, the interview provided some useful information. It underscored Hitler’s intention to create an empire in Europe. If they had compared his present claims with his statements in Mein Kampf, they could have spotted the inconsistencies, which in turn should have led them to expect Hitler to widen the war for control of eas
tern lands. In short, this meeting confirmed what they already expected. It did not provide any great revelations. Yet the way in which Hitler presented his aims did suggest that his key driver was messianic. Economic hegemony was not his prime concern. Instead, he coolly explained that he intended to restore Germany’s historic greatness as an empire. He concluded the meeting with the notion that all countries would go down together, suggesting a fanatical devotion to his cause. For Roosevelt and Welles to know whether Hitler’s words genuinely reflected his beliefs or were instead mere rhetoric, they would have had to consider Hitler’s pattern breaks.
In the search for any last possible clues to Hitler’s underlying motivations, Welles met with Field Marshall Hermann Göring. Rumors had spread of a possible rift between Hitler and Göring. Welles needed to see if such a division existed and could be exploited. Deep within a national game reserve, Göring had constructed a massive monument to his own bloated sense of self-importance. After a ninety-minute drive from Berlin through a heavy snowfall and biting winds, Welles was delivered in an open car to the Field Marshall’s sanctuary at Karin Hall. From the entrance to the reserve, they rode another ten miles through pine and birch forest, past Göring’s personal collection of rare aurochs, the stocky bull-like ancestor of the domestic cattle. Göring’s dwellings were still in process of being expanded. When finished, they planned to rival the size of Washington’s National Art Gallery. Inside the main log cabin, glass cases lined the walls, housing ornate cups, bowls, beakers, and various objects of solid gold.