Page 172 - Was Hitler a Riddle?

The American Diplomats 159

sional diplomat, but he had some impressive qualifications for service in
Germany. For three years (1897–1900), he had studied at the University of
leipzig, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on thomas Jefferson. He
had mastered German and had even published a book in German. after re-
turning to america, he concentrated on the history of the american south
and produced several well-regarded works in that field, as well as a study
of Woodrow Wilson. in 1908 he began to teach at the University of Chi-
cago, where he acquired a national reputation in his field. during his stay
in leipzig he had read widely on the history of Germany up to the twenti-
eth century, but once he returned to the United states he did not keep up
with contemporary German politics. He was a man of strong views, and he
tended to cling to them dogmatically, a trait that at times prevented him
from understanding political positions different from his own.
a passionate democrat—as well as democrat—dodd arrived in Ger-
many with deep misgivings about Nazism, even though, like rumbold,
he harbored mild anti-semitic prejudices. Yet in his early days in Berlin he
was confident that he would be able to persuade Nazi leaders to moderate
their policies, and for several months he remained convinced that Hitler
himself was a moderate who could be prevailed upon to abandon the reck-
less course favored by the radicals in his party. during his meeting with the
Führer in October 1933, the ambassador was taken in by Hitler’s rhetoric
in favor of world peace and wrote to the state department that the “total
effect of the interviews was far more favorable from the point of view of the
maintenance of world peace than i had expected.” But, also like rumbold,
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he was soon appalled by the Nazi persecution of the Jews, and his reports
from Berlin often exposed the brutality of Hitler’s anti-semitism. He came
to believe that the Nazi campaign against the Jews must be seen as symp-
tomatic of the Nazi creed and was therefore a key to grasping the essential
nature of Hitlerism. Over the next few years, this theme became central to
many of the dispatches by his staff.
at first glance, it seems surprising that despite his somewhat benign view
of Hitler, ambassador dodd, shortly after his arrival in Berlin, sent a series
of detailed and candid dispatches to Washington describing the repressive
nature of the Nazi regime. But when it came to civil rights, dodd could
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not hold his tongue. in one of his earliest messages, he reported that there
of dodd’s daughter, he also gives a vivid description of conditions in Germany’s capital—es-
pecially in the political sphere—during the first four years of Nazi rule. readers interested in
pursuing the subject of americans in Nazi Germany further might turn to andrew Nagorski,
Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power, which appeared in early 2012. By
that time, i had completed my study.