Page 209 - Was Hitler a Riddle?

196 The American Diplomats

the United states of a large Jewish community that frequently expressed its
horror at Nazi persecutions of co-religionists and called on the roosevelt
administration to protest Nazi policies no doubt played a role in stimulat-
ing the diplomats to focus on the mistreatment of Jews. But their concen-
tration on this subject also suggests that the diplomats realized that they
were describing a regime unique in the twentieth century. their perspicac-
ity would become fully evident only a few years after they left Germany,
when the Nazi assault on the Jews turned into what is now known as the
Holocaust.
the american diplomats were less comprehensive and less insightful in
their reporting on Hitler’s foreign political goals. they paid less attention
than their British and French colleagues to the significance of Hitler’s with-
drawal from the league of Nations, his program of rapid rearmament, his
march into the rhineland, his annexations of austria, and even his march
into Czechoslovakia. this is not to say that the american diplomats en-
tirely ignored these matters or that they expressed no apprehension about
the Nazis’ expansionist ambitions. as noted, ambassador dodd pointed to
some dangerous signs of bellicosity in Nazi policies and statements. and
in a letter of June 9, 1934, raymond Geist, who was outraged by Nazi
domestic policies, wrote a letter to Jay Pierrepont Moffat, the chief of the
division of Western european affairs in the department of state, warning
that Germany “would certainly rearm and definitely prepare to wage a war
against europe in general, which would change the course of history, if not
of civilization beyond what we even dream, if their supreme effort would
be successful.” 133 But these were relatively isolated comments.
this stance of american diplomats no doubt reflected the prevailing
views in the upper circles of the government and of large sectors of public
opinion. during the first five years of the third reich, from 1933 to 1938,
President roosevelt tended to downplay the danger of Nazism. He dis-
paraged its ideology and privately referred to Hitler as a “madman” who
would never be able to revive the German economy. When he was pre-
sented with a copy of Mein Kampf in 1933, he read it in english although
he knew German, and concluded that the translation was so shoddy that it
could not be considered an accurate rendering of Hitler’s views; the “origi-
nal would make a very different story.” the president believed that Hitler
only wanted to persuade the West to agree to strike out the clauses in the
treaty of Versailles that Germany found most objectionable, which could
be achieved, in roosevelt’s view, by negotiation. Only in the fall of 1938,
when Hitler made demands on Czechoslovakia for territorial concessions,