surrounded by such threatening neighbors, he insisted. The armies of France, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Belgium had fifty soldiers for every German soldier, he added, which meant that if there was any outbreak of fighting, the responsibility would clearly be theirs.
As Armstrong recalled, a lock of Hitler’s hair came down menacingly over his eye as he forcefully punctuated his argument with what he believed was irrefutable logic: “To say the contrary is to say that a toothless rabbit would start a battle with a tiger.”
Hitler had no problem combining his withering attacks on Poland, the most anti-Bolshevik country in the region, which had fought a war with Russia in 1920, with his thesis that the world’s key countries should unite to defend themselves against the threat of Bolshevism. “We are armed today with spears, bows and arrows and swords,” he continued. “Does that condition represent a danger to the peace of the world? Or does the danger of war come from the vast arms produced by Poland?” The only means to right those wrongs, he insisted, was for Germany to rearm. “We cannot and will not wait longer. The
Armstrong tried to interject other questions during the rare moments when Hitler paused in his monologues, but the German leader had no interest in anything resembling a give-and-take. As Hitler escorted him to the door, Armstrong slipped in his barbed thanks for addressing him rather than the usual millions of Germans. The German leader missed the irony completely and declared he had enjoyed their “animated talk.”
On the way back to the Adlon, Hanfstaengl was effusive, claiming that Hitler was more open than he had ever been with a foreign visitor. “Wasn’t he lovely to you?” he asked rhetorically. Besides, he added, it was such a great compliment that he had escorted his guest to the door, which he normally didn’t do.
But Armstrong was feeling anything but “lovely” about the new Germany, which was so different than the country he had visited in the 1920s. Returning to New York, he quickly wrote a slim volume called
A people has disappeared. Almost every German whose name the world knew as a master of government or business in the Republic of the past fourteen years is gone. There are exceptions; but the waves are swiftly cutting the sand from beneath them, and day by day, one by one, these last specimens of another age, another folk, topple over into the Nazi sea. So completely has the Republic been wiped out that the Nazis find it difficult to believe it ever existed…
Anyone who did not accept Hitler’s rule, pledging full allegiance to the man and his movement, wasn’t just wiped out: “It is pretended that he never was. His name is not mentioned, even in scorn. If one asks about him, a vague answer is given: ‘Oh, yes—but is he still alive? Maybe he is abroad. Or is he in a nursing home?’ This does not apply merely to Jews and communists, fled or imprisoned or detained ‘for their own protection’ in barbed-wire concentration camps…” Then he went on to mention several national, state and city officials who were also in the category of the persecuted, the broken or now in exile. “The men who ruled Germany in these fourteen years have been swept away, out of sight, out of mind, out (according to the program of Dr. Goebbels, propagandist-in-chief) of history.”
Armstrong neatly conveyed the strategy of the Nazis as they resurrected “Teutonic mysticism” and the notion of “the German super-man,” but had to explain why the superior warrior was defeated in the previous war. “Either he is not a super-man, or there is an alibi,” he wrote. “The alibi is furnished by the Jew, the traitor within the gates.”
Despite this stark portrait of the new Germany that he painted, Armstrong asked near the end of his book whether Hitler, “having given the German spirit an opportunity to purge itself of part of its store of resentment and hate and envy,” might chart a more moderate course, more like his predecessors who tried to redress their country’s grievances in a more patient, long-term manner. “The first phase of the revolution is over,” he concluded. “But we cannot pretend that as yet there is any real evidence to cause our fears to diminish, or that our questions can as yet be given any conclusive answers.”
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
