Like Consul General Messersmith and other American diplomats, Dodd found himself trying to intervene in the growing number of cases where Americans were beaten by Brownshirts, especially after they failed to give Heil Hitler salutes. Foreign Minister von Neurath assured him that he would do everything possible to prevent such incidents in the future, but he maintained that the Brownshirts “are so uncontrollable that I am afraid we cannot stop them.”
In a Columbus Day speech to the American Chamber of Commerce luncheon at the Adlon Hotel, Dodd decided to make some broader points about the nature of government and the perils of repressive actions. With representatives of the Foreign, Economics and Propaganda ministries present, he warned that new social experiments could easily end in disaster. “It would be no sin if statesmen learned enough of history to realize that no system which implies control of society by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse,” he declared. As an alternative, he pointed to Thomas Jefferson’s belief that “to develop the ideal social order was to leave every man the utmost freedom of initiative and action and always to forbid any man or group of men to profiteer at the expense of others.”
Dodd was immensely gratified by the “extraordinary applause” his declaration produced, although he noted the high level of tension in the room. He also recognized that the authorities were showing signs of irritation with his pronouncements and his persistent inquiries about the assaults on Americans. “It is evident some dislike of me is arising here now in official circles,” he wrote. “I believe it is simply Nazi opposition.”
On October 17, the ambassador was able to present his case directly to Hitler. His first impression: “He looks somewhat better than the pictures that appear in papers.” When Dodd raised the issue again of attacks on Americans, Hitler sounded accommodating. As the ambassador wrote in his diary, “The Chancellor assured me personally that he would see that any future attack was punished to the limit and that publicity would be given to decrees warning everyone that foreigners were not to be expected to give the Hitler salute.”
But when Dodd asked Hitler about his recent announcement that Germany was withdrawing from the League of Nations, the chancellor “ranted” about the Treaty of Versailles and the many alleged indignities a victimized Germany had faced at the hands of the victors of World War I. Dodd conceded that the French had been unjust, but he tried to strike a more philosophical note. War is always followed by injustice, he argued, citing the example of how southern states were treated after the U.S. Civil War. But Hitler wasn’t exactly the eager student of history: he remained conspicuously silent as the former professor tried to illustrate his point.
A few days earlier, Dodd had tried to take a similarly philosophical tack with Roosevelt in discussing the nature of what was happening in Germany. In an October 12 letter to the president, he wrote about the need for reserving judgment on that country’s new rulers, implying that there was still reason for hope. “Fundamentally, I believe a people has a right to govern itself and that other peoples must exercise patience even when crudities and injustices are done. Give men a chance to try their schemes.”
Dodd tried to draw Hitler out on what his schemes might be—specifically, whether a border incident with any of Germany’s neighbors could trigger a new war. “No, no,” Hitler protested. But when Dodd asked whether he would try to call a European conference if there were any flare-up in the Ruhr Valley, he replied: “That would be my purpose, but we might not be able to restrain the German people.” Dodd noted in his diary, “I saw that meant the violent Nazis whom he has trained to violence.” The ambassador’s conclusion: “My first impression was of his belligerence and self-confidence.”
Still, Dodd wasn’t convinced that Hitler had the full support of the German people and questioned how strong his grip on power really was. Two days before he met the chancellor, he had gone to the movies and observed that Hitler’s appearance in a newsreel only triggered tepid applause. “Hitler is surely not so powerful with the people as Mussolini, the Italian despot, has been,” he observed. But Dodd certainly understood the physical danger represented by his movement. On the last Sunday in October, he was walking along the Tiergartenstrasse at noon and spotted a procession of Storm Troopers approaching. “I walked into the park to avoid embarrassment,” he recorded in his diary. Understandably, he did not want to become a cause célèbre by not giving the Hitler salute and possibly paying the price as other Americans already had.
Nonetheless, Dodd was intent on continuing to do what he could to make the case that Germany should put some brakes on repression, preserving a modicum of liberty and decency. Asked to speak at the German-American Church Forum on November 19, which was designated as Martin Luther Day, the ambassador lectured about Luther’s life “just as I would have done before an American audience,” he noted with visible pride. The audience was about two-thirds German and one-third American, and both groups applauded him enthusiastically. “It was clear to me that Germans wished me to say in public what they are not allowed to say in private, especially about religious and personal freedom,” he concluded.
Dodd had by no means shed all illusions about Hitler’s intentions. In early December, Sir Eric Phipps, his British counterpart in Berlin, dropped by his house to brief him on Hitler’s renewal of an earlier proposal to discuss a disarmament deal with France. Under its provisions, Germany would be able to maintain a 300,000-man army along with guns and “defensive airplanes.” Now, Hitler was adding that he would include a ten-year pledge not to go to war, and accept international supervision of German armaments and of its 2.5 million SA and SS troops. Dodd promised to cable a report summarizing this offer to Washington, and noted optimistically in his diary, “It looked to me like a real move towards disarmament…”
But if the ambassador continued to hold out hope that Hitler might prove to be more reasonable than his rhetoric and program indicated, he was hardly at ease in his company—and sensed that the German leader was equally ill at ease with him. On January 1, 1934, Berlin’s diplomatic corps gathered in the Presidential Palace to pay their respects to eighty-six-year-old President von Hindenburg. When Hitler showed up, he and Dodd exchanged New Year’s greetings. Then, seeking to find a seemingly neutral subject of conversation, the American told him that he had recently spent a few very pleasant days in Munich, where Hitler had spent part of the holidays. Dodd mentioned that he had met “a fine German historian”—a Professor Meyer who had studied with him in Leipzig. When Hitler indicated he had no idea who Meyer was, Dodd mentioned some other academics at Munich University. But, once again, Hitler didn’t display any signs of recognition, “leaving the impression that he had never had contacts with the people I knew and respected.”
“I was afraid he thought I was trying to embarrass him a little,” Dodd wrote in his diary. “I was not. There was, however, no diplomatic or political subject we could mention these touchy times.” Hanfstaengl, who had made a point of cultivating his ties with both the ambassador and his daughter Martha, would later claim that there was another reason for the awkwardness between the chancellor and the American envoy. “Der gute Dodd, he can hardly speak German and made no sense at all,” Hitler told Putzi. In the eyes of Der Führer, Dodd’s earnestness left almost no impression. The German leader was only too happy to dismiss him as an inconsequential figure representing a country that was “hopelessly weak and could not interfere in any way with the realization of… [his] plans.”
Hanfstaengl shared his leader’s scorn for Dodd. “He was a modest little Southern history professor, who ran his embassy on a shoe-string and was probably trying to save money out of his pay,” he wrote in his postwar memoir. “At a time when it needed a robust millionaire to compete with the flamboyance of the Nazis, he teetered round self-effacingly as if he was still on a college campus.”
The notion that a flashier, wealthier envoy could have “competed” with the Nazis is, to put it mildly, a bizarre argument that says more ab
out Hanfstaengl than it does about Dodd. Putzi still proudly strutted about town as Hitler’s propagandist, while Dodd was at least trying to push back against the Nazi tide—even if it was proving to be a futile effort.
In the first year of Hitler’s rule, there was at least one American visitor who had come to a quick judgment about what was happening and decided to issue a blunt warning to the Nazis. He was Sherwood Eddy, a Protestant missionary and YMCA national secretary who had traveled and taught in Asia, Russia and Germany, writing several books about his experiences and views. The Carl Schurz Society, named after a German-American politician and journalist who had served as a general in the Union Army during the Civil War and then become the first German-American elected to the U.S. Senate, was hosting a reception for the annual American Seminar in July 1933, and Eddy was the leader of the visiting delegation. In fact, as he pointed out to his hosts, this was his twelfth visit to Germany.
The continuation of such meetings was supposed to send a signal of reassurance that the new regime was committed to peace. At the reception, the German speakers praised Hitler’s recent Reichstag speech on international relations. According to reporter Bella Fromm, who as usual was present at such social events, they delivered a double-edged message: “Any possible concern in foreign countries as to the aggressive intentions of Germany should disappear. After all, the Führer principle is also represented in America under Roosevelt.”
Eddy responded with a polite profession of his love for Germany and delicately edged into the subject of the new regime. “I noted the unity of enthusiasm and zeal in what you call the ‘New Germany.’ I have always approved of enthusiasm and zeal.” But then he quickly made his point. “Besides my love for Germany, I have another, even stronger love in my heart: the love for humanity.” And that love, he continued, made him into a firm proponent of “impartial justice; freedom of speech, press, and assembly; fundamental moral and economic principles.” In case anyone didn’t get the point, he added, “These freedoms have to be accepted by all nations who claim cultural integrity.”
Eddy mentioned that he had upheld the same principles in Russia and refused to remain silent about the blatant violations of them there. “As a friend of Germany, I state that you are acting against the principles of justice,” he continued, making the Nazis in the audience “gasp in consternation,” as Fromm noted. “There is no room for a twofold justice, one for ‘Aryans’ and ‘Nordics,’ and another one for Social Democrats, Communists, Liberals, Jews, and Pacifists. Don’t say it’s your affair. It concerns the whole world when we in the United States conduct a lynching… The world is also concerned when you commit similar injustice.”
As he warmed to his topic, Eddy addressed the Germans even more bluntly: “In your country, injustice is committed every day, every hour. What are you doing to Catholics, Communists, Social Democrats, Jews? What atrocities are committed behind the wall of your horrible concentration camps? I see your papers.”
With that, Eddy held up that day’s edition of the Nazi daily Völkischer Beobachter with the headline “70,000 Jews Immigrated into Germany Within the Last 15 Years.” He called the statement not only wrong but “an instigation of youth, a kindling of race-hatred, a signal for cruel and wanton destruction.” Mentioning that he had heard the “Jew baiting” at meetings in Germany, he warned: “This must lead to a massacre… I am deeply worried about this country, which I love.”
Many of the foreigners in the audience applauded him. “The Nazis, pale, with rage, sat immobile, in cold silence,” Fromm recorded. But she wasn’t about to get the chance to write anything about this extraordinary performance by the visiting American missionary in her newspaper. Instead, another reporter plucked out the most innocuous parts of Eddy’s opening remarks and ended with his alleged pledge to urge friendly understanding for the new Germany in his home country. “I gasped when I read the piece,” Fromm wrote in her diary. But there was nothing she could do to set the public record straight.
In his clarity of vision and willingness to deliver his tough message, Eddy was unlike almost any other early American visitor to the “new Germany.” There were others who were troubled by the behavior of the Nazis, but very few who truly understood the sweeping nature of the transformation of the country and its people, and the danger this represented.
Often, American visitors would exhibit no more than a vague uneasiness. Future novelist Wright Morris, then only twenty-three, hopped a freighter from New York to Antwerp in October 1933, setting off to explore Europe. During his sojourn there, he briefly passed through Germany, checking into a youth hostel in Heidelberg. The dormer window of his room looked out on a park where blond children were playing, the weather was beautiful, and, as he walked about the city, he was keenly aware of its romantic tradition. “On the bridge over the Neckar I stood long and long, looking at the castle, my fancy on the Rhine maidens and the mists behind it,” he wrote in his travel memoir.
But he also felt his “first presentiments that something was rotten in this picture of perfection. Behind the light and the shadow, the trilling voices of the children, lurked a danger in which we were all complicit.” When he entered a tobacco shop to look at some pipes, he caught sight of someone spying on him through a curtain. “In the shopwoman’s smiling, unctuous manner there was something both disturbing and false,” he recalled. “I could hear muttered whisperings behind the curtain. My sense of apprehension was unused and rudimentary, since I had felt it so seldom, but in the eyes and furtive manner of this woman I felt, and shared, a nameless disquiet.” Nonetheless, Morris was quick to add, “Back in the sunlight I soon forgot it.”
Others were keen to overlook any disquieting signs, convinced that the key to international harmony was recognition of the notion that every country was free to choose its own path and that people everywhere have more in common than they realize. No one believed that more passionately than Donald B. Watt of Putney, Vermont, who in the summer of 1932 took his first small group of young Americans to Europe, launching the Experiment in International Living. The highly successful exchange program, which includes stays with local families, continues to operate today. As Watt put it, his aim was “to create a controlled human situation which would produce understanding and friendliness between people and different cultures in a limited period of time.”
Watt’s enthusiasm for “making friends out of ‘foreigners’” made him shrug off—and even mock—all those who warned him against taking his young idealistic travelers to Germany in the summer of 1933 for the second “Experiment” after Hitler had taken power. “From its war-like reputation, one would have expected Germany to have been most inhospitable toward a group interested in making peace,” Watt wrote. “Just the opposite materialized: the Nazi organizations made us feel most welcome… The picture which the [American] newspapers gave and what we actually saw in our families could scarcely have been more different.” Specifically on the subject of violence, he added, “The suggestion of personal danger to foreigners is no less laughable to those who spent the summer in that country than the thought of German courtesy failing.”
Watt did concede after the trip that there was an “excess of order” and “hypnosis of the masses” orchestrated by the Nazis. But the only real danger for a visiting foreigner, he felt, was not to be swept up by “the power of suggestion” of the constant saluting and “to use all his restraint if he does not wish to join the saluting throng.” Despite the widespread reports of beatings of visiting Americans who failed to join in the Nazi salutes, Watt maintained that his charges were free to do whatever they pleased. Living with German families, they began to understand that they had been victims of propaganda back in the United States. “All they had learned of Hitlerism in America was definitely unfavorable, but here they actually saw some good features of it,” Watt wrote.
Even when it came to Jews, he reported that everyone in his group concluded that “relatively few [were] roughly handled.” The main cause of anti-S
emitism in Germany, he added, was the fact that “a large proportion of all business was in Jewish hands.” The young Americans were also impressed how Germans “are surmounting their relative poverty by a return to simple folk ways.” But the key takeaway, as Watt put it, was the one he had come searching for—and was determined to find no matter what happened. “Perhaps most important of all, we realized that the people whom we met were very much like us,” he concluded. “The Second Experiment in International Living was an interesting and successful demonstration of tolerance.”
The American social scientists who studied the new Germany were distinctly less Pollyannaish, but they were far from uniform in their judgments of the country’s New Order. Political scientist Frederick Schuman—who, like Dodd, taught at the University of Chicago—spent eight months in Germany in 1933. He had arranged his research trip before Hitler had come to power, but that event now changed both the nature of his stay and its purpose. “I journeyed toward a land I had already known and enjoyed as the home of music, philosophy, and Gemütlichkeit and as the birthplace of my Prussian and Hanoverian ancestors, now strangely transmuted into ‘Aryans’ and ‘Nordics,’” he wrote. “Upon my arrival in April of the year of the Nazi seizure of power I found the Reich in process of violent, if orderly, transition from parliamentary democracy to Fascism.”
Schuman made the focus of his research the newly triumphant Nazi movement, gathering materials for his 1935 book The Nazi Dictatorship: A Study in Social Pathology and the Politics of Fascism. Given the nature of his encounters, its analytical but highly critical tone was hardly surprising. “By the older German officials I was invariably received with courtesy and granted as much co-operation as was consistent with considerations of political and personal safety,” he recalled. “By the newer Nazi administrators I was invariably received with evasions and complex circumlocutions or, as in the case of Hanfstaengl, with gross and clownish discourtesy bred of psychic insecurity and conceit.”
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