Page 160 - Was Hitler a Riddle?

The American Diplomats 147

was perhaps better informed than any other” on conditions in Germany.
3
to most american diplomats who observed events firsthand, neither Hitler
nor Nazism was a riddle, and they provided Washington with ample infor-
mation for the crafting of sound policies regarding the New Order.
despite his lack of credentials as a diplomat, Frederic sackett, the U.s.
ambassador in Berlin from February 1930 until shortly after Hitler’s rise
to power, was not ill-cast in his new role. He was intelligent, diligent, and
insightful and quickly acquired sufficient information about German and
european politics to handle the new assignment; it did not take him long
to sense that Germany was in the throes of a great upheaval. By the end of
the year, he concluded that the Nazi leader was a rabble-rouser totally unfit
to govern. early in december 1930, sackett reported having hoped that by
this time the “wave of recklessness and disgust” that had prevailed at the
time of the reichstag election in mid-september would have subsided. But
to his chagrin, a series of local elections on November 16 and 30 “revealed
a distinctly disturbing tendency.” despite Chancellor Heinrich Brüning’s
best efforts to stem the political tide moving in Hitler’s direction, “Hitler’s
lieutenants, who are constantly gaining greater experience in demagogism,
have been able to exploit local causes of unrest and discontent.” as a con-
sequence, the Nazis had made substantial gains in the elections in Bremen
and elsewhere, which demonstrated that Hitlerism “is still in full flow.”
4
sackett decided that he could be most helpful to the moderate forces in
the country by working closely with Chancellor Brüning to shore up the
Weimar republic. in Washington, secretary of state Henry stimson was
also “troubled” by developments in Germany, especially by the widespread
disorder, but he was less pessimistic. in a memorandum he wrote a few days
before receiving sackett’s report, he indicated that he was not yet willing
to write off Germany. after all, in the United states there were also Com-
munists “and violent elements which were as bad as those in any other
country,” but that did not mean that they represented a dominant force in
society. stimson thought that the same could be true of Germany. 5
For a variety of reasons, american ambassadors had considerably less
contact with Hitler and other senior Nazi officials than their British or
French colleagues, and that might explain why they tended not to dwell
on the personal attributes or ideology of the Führer, both of which, we
now know, bore significantly on his conduct of affairs. George a. Gordon,
the senior political analyst in Berlin during the early 1930s and on occa-
sion the chargé d’affaires, was a stickler for protocol and insisted that no
one on the embassy staff was to meet with opponents of the government,