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.
Shortly before his departure, however, there came a glint of light that heartened him and suggested that his efforts had not been wasted. On March 12 an official of Germany’s foreign office, Hans-Heinrich Dieckhoff, announced at a meeting of the German Press Club that henceforth Germany would require that a warrant be issued before any arrest and that the notorious Columbia House prison would be closed. Dodd believed that he personally had much to do with the order.
He would have been less heartened to learn of Hitler’s private reaction to their last meeting, as recorded by Putzi Hanfstaengl. “Dodd made no impression,” Hanfstaengl wrote. “Hitler was almost pitying.” After the meeting, Hitler had said: “
Which accorded rather closely with the reaction, back in Washington, of Jay Pierrepont Moffat. In his diary Moffat wrote, “Ambassador Dodd, quite without instruction, took up with Hitler the President’s non-aggression idea and asked him point-blank if he would attend an international conference to discuss this. Where the Ambassador got the idea that we wanted another international conference is a mystery.”
With clear exasperation Moffat wrote, “I am glad he is soon returning on leave.”
THE NIGHT BEFORE his departure Dodd went up to his bedroom and found Fritz, the butler, packing his suitcases. Dodd grew annoyed. He did not trust Fritz, but that wasn’t the issue here. Rather, Fritz’s efforts abraded his own Jeffersonian instincts. Dodd wrote in his diary, “I do not think it a disgrace for a man to pack his own bags.”
On Tuesday, March 13, he and all his family drove to Hamburg, 180 miles northwest of Berlin, where he bade everyone good-bye and settled into his cabin aboard the SS
DODD WAS HAPPILY AFLOAT when the German government’s anger about the mock trial flared again. The Third Reich, it seemed, simply could not let the issue go.
On the day of Dodd’s sailing, fully six days after the trial, Ambassador Luther in Washington again called on Secretary Hull. According to Hull’s account, Luther protested “such offensive and insulting acts by the people of one country against the Government and its officials of another country.”
By this point Hull was losing patience. After offering a pro forma expression of regret and reiterating that the mock trial had no connection to the U.S. government, he launched a sly attack. “I stated further that I trusted that the people of every country would, in the future, exercise such self-restraint as would enable them to refrain from excessive or improper manifestations or demonstrations on account of the action of peoples of another country. I sought to make this latter veiled reference to Germany plain. I then added generally that the world seems to be in a ferment to a considerable extent, with the result that the people in more countries than one are neither thinking nor acting normally.”
Ten days later, amid a snowstorm, the German ambassador returned yet again, angrier than ever. As Luther entered Hull’s office, the secretary quipped that he hoped the ambassador “was not feeling as cool as the snow falling outside.”
Using language that Hull described as “almost violent,” Luther spent the next forty-five minutes angrily citing a list of “abusive and insulting expressions of American citizens towards the Hitler Government.”
Hull expressed his sorrow that America had become a target of German criticism but then noted that at least “my government was not alone in this situation; that virtually all the governments surrounding Germany and also those in and about his country seemed to be likewise in rather distinct disfavor on one account or another; and that his government as at present constituted seemed for some reason to be almost entirely isolated from all countries, although I did not intimate that it had been in the least at fault in a single instance. I said that it might be well, however, for his government to check its conditions of isolation and see where the trouble or fault lay.”
Hull also pointed out that America’s relationship with previous German governments had been “uniformly agreeable” and stated that “it was only during the control of the present government that the troubles complained of had arisen, much to our personal and official regret.” He was careful to note that certainly this was mere “coincidence.”
The whole problem would go away, Hull intimated, if Germany “could only bring about a cessation of these reports of personal injuries which had been coming steadily to the United States from Germany and arousing bitter resentment among many people here.”
