with “Heil Hitler.” Then, he started replying with “Heil Roosevelt.” By his second year, those exchanges had become legendary in the school, and the charwomen would greet him with the Nazi salute but say “Heil Roosevelt.” He then replied, “Heil Hitler.”

Later, when Wedemeyer was suspected of pro-German sympathies, he explained how easily such banter could be misinterpreted. But there was little doubt that, even after World War II, he felt far more sympathetic to Germany than most of his countrymen. “… however greatly one was revolted by Hitler’s treatment of the Jews and his arrogant bullying of small neighboring nations, one was compelled by knowledge of the record and the facts of Germany’s situation to understand the dynamic of self-preservation which underlay the Nazi revolution,” he wrote. Germans felt that Hitler had raised them from the abyss, he added. “It did not require any prolonged study of history to learn how false was the popular image of Germany as the most aggressive of nations and recurrent disturber of the peace.”

At the German War College, Wedemeyer pointed out that he was exposed to constant lectures about the Bolshevik menace. “Beneath the propaganda I discerned a great deal of truth about Communist aims, practices, methods unknown or ignored in America until recently,” he wrote. In other words, he came to believe that the Roosevelt Administration was wrong to consider Germany to be the main danger in Europe. “I was convinced that the German search for Lebensraum did not menace the Western World to anything like the same degree as the world-wide Communist conspiracy centered in Moscow.”

Like Lindbergh, Wedemeyer gained remarkable insights into the German military buildup but came away convinced that the United States should stay out of the looming conflict in Europe. According to Kay Smith, however, Wedemeyer and her husband also had a significant talk in 1938. “It was Al with whom Truman first discussed plans for an assault of Germany if needed,” she wrote in her unpublished memoir. “That discussion took place in our apartment.”

The two men regularly compared notes on their experiences, and Smith shared his knowledge about Germany’s rapid military buildup, which he was conveying in his regular reports to Washington. “I like to think that some of Truman Smith’s shrewdness and knowledge rubbed off on me during my German War College period,” Wedemeyer wrote. Once he returned to the United States, Wedemeyer had little patience for those who were curious about the political situation in Germany. “I had been disillusioned by the superficiality and nonmilitary type of questions put to me,” he observed. “I had been asked all sorts of questions about Hitler’s peculiarities, the Nazi persecution of Jews, and about Goebbels and Goering’s love life, but almost nothing pertaining to strategy, or German capabilities, military training, and organization.”

But there was one man who asked about exactly those subjects based on Wedemeyer’s lengthy report: General George Marshall, who was chief of war plans. “When I reported to him, he had a copy on his desk, and had made many notes, indicating that he had read the report carefully,” Wedemeyer recalled. Marshall asked, “What is the most important lesson you brought back from the German experience?” The young officer replied that the Germans would never fight a war again the way they did the last time. Instead of trench warfare, they would use new equipment and tactics based on “high mobility.” As Wedemeyer noted in a memorandum decades later, “I don’t want to sound like I am bragging, however I can assure you that these discussions, especially concerning our strategy and our tactics as the war advanced, were almost daily occurrences in General Marshall’s office—just the two of us.”

Wedemeyer was boasting, of course, but justifiably so. Marshall chose him in the spring of 1941 to help draft the “Victory Program” outlining how the United States needed to mobilize its manpower and resources to prepare for war. By then a major, Wedemeyer worked diligently to prepare this ambitious plan, despite his sympathies for the America First movement that was fervently campaigning against the country’s entry into World War II. And in making those preparations for war, Wede-meyer drew extensively on his firsthand knowledge of Germany, the product of his two years at the German War College. The irony was that while Wedemeyer, like Lindbergh, opposed the Roosevelt Administration’s drift toward direct involvement in World War II, both men provided intelligence that would prove invaluable when their country joined the conflict.

In a 1937 updated edition of his famous book Germany Puts the Clock Back, Edgar Mowrer, the Chicago Daily News correspondent who had been forced to leave Germany in 1933, chronicled Hitler’s increasingly aggressive behavior, including moving troops into the demilitarized Rhineland, his repudiation of the Versailles Treaty and all its restrictions on a new military buildup, and Germany and Italy’s direct aid for the fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War. “A brief calendar of the first four years of Hitler reads like a hymn of victory from a Prussian historian or war poet,” he wrote.

By the end of 1938 and early 1939, the calendar was much fuller and the hymn soaring to new heights, extolling triumph after triumph. Austria had been annexed and Czechoslovakia carved up. To support the Nationalists against the Republicans in Spain’s civil war, Hitler had dispatched troops and his newest fighter planes to that country, using the conflict there as a testing ground for his latest weaponry and offsetting Stalin’s support for the Republican side. In March 1939, Hitler had demanded the Baltic port of Memel—or, as it is called today, Klaipeda—from Lithuania, and that tiny country quickly capitulated. Nothing, it seemed, stood in the way of more German victories. When the Spanish Civil War ended with the Nationalists triumphant, Beam watched from the windows of the U.S. Embassy the April victory parade of the German troops returning from there. He admitted it was “an awesome sight.”

While Roosevelt still insisted he wanted to do everything to ensure the peace, by early 1939 he was beginning to make preparations for an alternative scenario. In his State of the Union address on January 4, he stressed that there were “many methods short of war, but stronger and more effective than mere words, of bringing home to aggressor governments the aggregate sentiments of our own people.” Specifically, that meant upping military expenditures, which he promptly did by submitting a budget request with a 30 percent overall increase to $1.3 billion, not including an additional $500 million for acquiring new military aircraft.

For a while, the administration had considered sending Wilson back to his post in Berlin, but that idea was scuttled when Hitler took over what was left of Czechoslovakia in March. In the internal discussions in the State Department, Messersmith—the former consul general in Berlin—“his eyes aglow, favored any move directed against the Nazis,” Moffat recorded in his diary. The two men were friends, but they frequently engaged in verbal jousts. “George, I wonder if you know what you are doing,” Moffat told him on one occasion. “You are helping us into this war which is coming on.” Messersmith replied by insisting that it was impossible for Hitler and the Western democracies to coexist.

Many of his colleagues were more cautious, and Roosevelt was still inclined to offer what he hoped would be seen as an olive branch. On April 14, he sent an appeal to Hitler and Mussolini that they pledge not to attack thirty-one countries in Europe and the Middle East—including the most likely next target, Poland—for at least ten years.

The president wasn’t optimistic about the chances for success, but he was still stung by the mocking response from Berlin. On April 28, Hitler addressed the Reichstag, but he was focused on his audience abroad. Representing the U.S. Embassy, Beam witnessed his delivery, which the German leader had prepared for by first asking several of the thirty-one states whether they feared a German attack. “The great majority had replied in the negative which enabled Hitler to read out their names slowly, with an air of false drama,” the young diplomat recalled. “It was a beautifully-acted farce which provoked loud laughter.”

Beam didn’t overlook the “particularly chilling nature” of the speech, despite that bit of theater. Poland wasn’t one of the countries that Hitler had asked for its opinion, and he proceeded to denounce that country’s refusal to accede to his demands for Danzig. He also castigated the British for taking Poland’s side in this dispute. He renounced both the 1934 German-Polish nonaggression pact, which was supposed to ensure peace between those neighbors for ten years, and the 1935 Naval Agreement with Britain, which limited the German Navy to 35 percent of the tonnage of the British fleet. As Beam put it, Hitler was performing “as the world’s then most powerful head of state”—and he clearly meant for everyone to understand that.

Despite Hitler’s increasingly belligerent tone, there were still plenty of Americans who wanted to believe he was no threat to them. It was hardly surprising that those who desperately wanted to keep their country out of another global conflagration should feel that way, and some American envoys could be counted among them. Shortly after the Munich Pact, Joseph Kennedy, the American ambassador in London, had floated the idea that democracies and dictatorships “could advantageously bend their energies toward solving common problems by an attempt to re-establish good relations on a world basis.” But it was surprising when Wiegand, Hearst’s veteran

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