Falling for the Fuehrer

...The majority, however, succeeded in having it drawn up in such a way as to apply to all combatants regardless of culpability...

...No such consensus existed regarding Hitler's foreign policies...

...A spate of books and articles appeared which attributed American entry to foreign intrigue or to the lust for profits of American munitions makers...

...2. William E. Dodd, Jr...

...Czechoslovakia itself was a "corridor for Russia against Germany," according to one newspaper, and another stated that if Czechoslovakia became involved in war "the British nation will say to the Prime Minister with one voice: 'Keep out of it.' " (8) There was no need to fret: The Prime Minister himself (Neville Chamberlain) had no i~tention of risking conflict "'because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing...

...At the time of the Munich crisis he called upon all the leaders involved to work for a peaceful settlement, but also assured Hitler that the United States would "assume no obligations in the conduct of the present negotiations...

...Robert J. Maddox Falling for the Fuehrer "I only wish we bad a man of his [Hitler's] supreme quality at the head of affairs in our country today...

...The strength of this feeling can be seen in the successive neutrality acts passed by Congress between 1935 and 1939...

...Some people considered the purge of June 1934 as evidence of Hitler's lawlessness...

...Despite such portentous origins, the Silver Shirts at their peak counted less than 15,000 members and Pelley himself was done in by the law (JewishBolshevik conspiracy, in his mind) for having diverted organizational funds for his own personal use...

...One might recount how such intellectual luminaries as the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti could pen effusive poetry about the Duce - - a Dune he "drew to his heart...

...Hitler's repeated denunciations of Communism (until the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939) raised the possibility of a conflict with Russia which might destroy Bolshevism at its source...

...He did...

...What apparently struck Bartlett most, however, were Hitler's eyes: "so large and brown one might grow lyrical about them ff one were a woman...

...It includes such notables as Ezra Pound, Hilaire Belloc, George Santayana, Werner Sombart, Curzio Malaparte, Georges Sorel, George Bernard Shaw, Oswald Spengler, Rainer Maria Rilke, and T.S...

...Telling the truth about Hitler's Germany, one British official complained with bitter humor, "was to put the cat among the stool-pigeons...

...5) It was only after Germany's absorption of the rest of Czechoslovakia in March I939, that Roosevelt began moving tentatively to provide help for Great Britain and France should they become involved in war with Germany...

...Gilbert and Gott, Appeasers, pp...

...Our unneutral behavior toward Germany had gotten us into World War I, people said, and we must never repeat the mistake of taking sides...

...And see Arnold Offner's American Appeasement (Cambridge, 1969...

...Nazism was so odious in the minds of most Americans that even the anti-Semitic Father Coughlin felt compelled to disavow any taint of "racial Hitlerism...

...The fact that Hitler's eyes were blue says something about the accuracy of Bartlett's reportage...

...5. This and preceding quotation from Robert A. Divine, Roosevelt and World War II (Baltimore, 1969), pp...

...Ungaretti could have those poems republished as late as 1942, only to discover after the fall of Fascism, that the men of the "left" had always been right and he, Ungaretti, had been egregiously in error about Mussolini...

...In the months following he also curbed or eliminated those individuals and groups within the Nazi coalition who sought to exercise any sort of independent influence...

...3. Geoffrey S. Smith, To Save a Nation (New York, 1973), p. 55ff...

...If we were to attempt to catalogue all those intellectuals, of whatever stature or renown, who at one time or another found Mussolini the object of their enthusiasm, we might well fill a volume as large as the telephone directory of New York City--for in Italy during the Regime, such intellectuals were almost as abundant as garlic cloves...

...And the Depression itself tended to focus American attention on domestic problems rather than events in Europe...

...Those who praised him for one accomplishment or another usually qualified their remarks with references to the domestic situation...

...It was in Britain that large and influential numbers of otherwise ,'esponsible people reacted to Hitler during the 1930s as fatuously as leftists did to Stalin...

...11) The journalist Vernon Bartlett came away from a forty-minute interview not only convinced of Hitler's peaceful nature but that he intended to get rid of the concentration camps "without much delay...

...To understand the variety of American reactions, one must keep in mind developments since World War I. That conflict, ostensibly fought to make the world "safe for democracy," had done nothing of the sort as Mussolini's rise to power in Italy made plain...

...The American ambassador to Germany, William E. Dodd, Jr., sent report after scathing report to Washington, permitting his superiors no doubt as to what was going on...

...German territorial demands...

...The story of how Western intellectuals responded to Benito Mussolini can give little satisfaction to anyone...

...4. Robert James Maddox, William E. Borah and American Foreign Policy (Baton Rouge, 1969), p. 235...

...By 1934 the very able French Foreign Minister Jean-Louis Barthou was working to reach understandings with the Soviet Union, Poland, and the Little Entente (Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia), as a means of curbing Hitler's ambitions...

...All the major powers had correspondents there: The United States was particularly well-represented by figures such as Edgar Mowrer, William L. Shirer, and Dorothy Thompson...

...Perhaps the most absurd comment ever made by an American diplomat (which is saying a great deal) was that.Josef Stalin could not really be a tyrant because both dogs and children liked him...

...There was, for example, William Dudley Pelley's Silver Legion, better known as the Silver Shirts...

...There are a great many, however, who will ignore or even countenance in behalf of some ideal the most barbarous conduct of others...

...Austria was really a German state and the Versailles peacemakers had ruined, crippled and dismembered it ...I do not think the fact that he took Austria is nearly as serious as generally supposed...

...Reality could not be permitted to intrude upon the ideal of the great socialist experiment...

...A minority of Americans and Congressmen wished to apply such legislation The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977 7 (arms embargoes, denial of loans, etc...

...The SA had helped Hitler gain power, but subsequently became an embarrassment to him and he doubted the organization's loyalty to his personal leadership...

...An unlikely coalition of conservatives and liberals actually defended Hitler's apparent goals, if not his methods...

...To the long tradition of anti-British feeling in America was added the notion that we had "pulled their chestnuts out of the fire," and received only ingratitude as in British criticism of our insistence that they pay their war debts...

...6. Martin Gilbert and Richard Gott, The Appeasers (London, 1963), p. 26...

...Kemp...

...and a combination of inept successors, deep internal cleavages within France, and British haste to appease Hitler, resulted in a deepening paralysis of French policy...

...This "great achievement," Hearst stated in an interview, made the regime very popular with the German people...

...In the United States during the 1930s, such good liberals as John Dewey were denounced as "running dogs of fascism" by the Left for having concluded that reports of Stalin's purges were correct...

...Not so, according to the Times, for "Herr Hitler, whatever one may think of his methods, is genuinely trying to transform revolutionary fervor into moderate and constructive effort and to impose a high standard on National-Socialist officials...

...Though he told associates privately that he considered Hitler an "international gangster," he was unwilling to have the United States become involved officially...

...First of all, the list of intellectuals who publicly admired the Dune is both long and impressive...

...3) Fiscal irregularities also helped to undermine another of the more prominent pro-Nazi groups, the German-American Bund...

...The Times, which reflected the views of and influenced all three groups, saw grounds for optimism in Hitler's every move...

...Perhaps the most pathetic case involved David Lloyd George, the elderly British statesman who had been Prime Minister during the Versailles negotiations...

...German rearmament provides a good example...

...Wags, of course, immediately dubbed her "Mein" Kemp...

...Though unsure whether he had visited Heaven or Purgatory, he was certain that one night he had gone to where "humans go after being released...

...The Day that man ascends to the Chancellorship of the German people," said the voice, "take it as your timetable to...

...President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose conduct during the period 1939-41 would lead to charges that he pulled the United States into war, probably reflected the attitudes of most Americans through the I930s...

...Eliot, to mention only the most prominent and those who come immediately to mind...

...They recanted only after a aatastroplaia war andpolitical defeat...

...A. James Gregor Mussolini and the Intellectuals Many enthusiasts saw in the Duce the hope of the century...

...Beginning in the mid-1920s, disillusionment over our participation in the war became widespread...

...The Fuehrer, in short, was no softie...

...France was responsible for the Versailles Treaty, ran a popular view, and it was from that vindictive settlement that almost all Europe's troubles had grown...

...4) As late as the summer of 1939, Borah insisted that talk of war was the concoction of British and French propagandists who wished for their own purposes to involve the United States in European affairs...

...9) Its editor, Geoffrey Dawson, spared no effort to avoid giving the Germans offense...

...Its leader, Fritz Kuhn, claimed no extraterrestrial help in leading an organization which grew so obnoxious that the German government had to disavow it...

...They can probably also be suborned--at remarkably little expense...

...Such people went on being "convinced of Hitler's sincerity," A.L...

...mDavid Lloyd George, December 17, 1937 " I f a mad dog makes a dash for my trousers, I shoot him down before he can bite...

...Rowse, Appeasement: A Study in Political Decline, 1933-1939 (New York, 1961), p. 30...

...38, 46...

...As Robert A. Divine has pointed out, Roosevelt during this period spoke in the classic terms of isolationism...

...Within this context American reactions toward German rearmament and other violations of the Versailles Treaty were marked above all by the strong determination that the United States must avoid involvement in European affairs whatever happened...

...As time passed, Dodd came to find Hitler so loathsome as to become physically ill after interviews with him...

...Perhaps, under the dictatorship, Italian intellectuals could not pursue their trade without a Fascist passport...

...Arnold Toynbee returned from a oneand-three-quarter-hour visit...

...Or one might call to mind the case of Paolo Monelli, who during Mussolini's tenure, applauded, publicly and with some considerable frequency, the Duce's "vast vision" and "boundless love" for Italy's land and people, only to discover after the war that Mussolini had always been a "petty-bourgeois despot...

...There was one exception...

...I) Private admirers of Hitler and closet anti-Semites there undoubtedly were: Dodd himself noted in his dairy that during a visit to the United States he attended a dinner with, among others, a prominent senator who "talks like a National Socialist...

...Winston Churchill Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933...

...Thus the American response to Hitler's diplomacy was a mixture of ingredients: disillusionment over World War I, anti-British and anti-Russian sentiment, guilt feelings about the Versailles Treaty, the hope that each of Hitler's demands would be the last one, and above all, the very understandable desire to stay out of war regardless of its causes...

...Some Britishers saw the treaty as the source of everything Hitler did, including his brutal domestic policies...

...William Randolph Hearst, for instance, who had so unabashedly admired Mussolini, lauded Hitler for having saved Germany from going Communist...

...Their default on payments, after the Depression began, confirmed this attitude...

...Information received through official channels was equally unsparing...

...selectively, as a means of curbing aggressors...

...I only wish we had a man of his supreme quality at the head of affairs in our country today...

...Within weeks he moved to crush opposition parties, unions, and all other organizations which threatened Nazi domination of the state...

...This desire to satisfy Hitler's every demand (sometimes before he even made them) was widespread within the British upper classes, the press, and the government itself...

...As late as 1939 one British official wrote that "...a great many people including, I think, Mr...

...and Gilbert and Gott, Appeasers, p. 50...

...7) Presumably, having attained parity in arms, Hitler would then consent to "real" disarmament on the basis of equality...

...Upon his return he believed himself possessed with the ability to "tune in on the minds and voices of those in another dimension of being...

...It was well known in England that Germany had been violating the arms restrictions provided for by the Versailles Treaty even before Hitler took power--and he speeded up the process...

...8, 22...

...7. lbid.,p...

...Barthou was assassinated in October of that year...

...Some liberals, on the other hand, while not anti-Soviet, justified Hitler's attempts to escape the restrictions of Versailles on the ground that it was a humiliating, repressive settlement...

...Each one was greeted by the appeasers with the same answer: What Hitler wanted rightfully belonged to Germany or was necessary for her self-defense...

...The Rhineland was German, Austria was German, the Sudetenland was German...

...Still, Hearst noted, the regime was guilty of "very obvious and very serious mistakes...

...The most obvious example occurred during the "night of the long knives" in June 1934, when he purged the leadership of the SA (Sturmabteilung), or Brownshirts...

...France alone of the Western powers appeared willing to stand against Hitler--at least in the beginning...

...The consequences of this approach had wide ramifications...

...convinced of his [Hitler's] sincerity in desiring peace...

...Whether they expected to see him torturing kittens for amusement is not clear, but the fact that he often spoke in the most reasonable tones usually sent them off singing his praises...

...Whereas many Americans held the British responsible for what had happened, Britishers themselves blamed France...

...2) Table talk was one thing, speaking out in public another...

...Ambassador Dodd's Diary (New York, 1941), p. 212...

...Pelley was a mystic or, as one critic put it, "a spiritualistic nut," who claimed to have undergone a transcendental experience during the mid1920s...

...The first condition," wrote Lord Lothian, "...is that we should be willing to do justice to Germany...

...Was it really necessary for Curzio Malaparte to identify Mussolini as a "hero" larger than life...

...Whether any steps the United States conceivably might have taken would have altered Hitler's behavior is conjectural, but certainly our passivity contributed to the spirit of appeasement in Great Britain and France...

...1. Quoted in Raymond Gram Swing, Forerunners of Fascism (New York, 1935), p. 34...

...This and Hitler' s repeated expressions of admiration for the man who had defeated Germany earlier, sent the old-timer away burbling in gratitude...

...Not to worry, said some, for how could anyone ask Germany to disarm before she had rearmed...

...I have always been convinced that the peace of the world depends more than anything else upon our getting into reasonable relations with Germany...

...But sometimes we are chastened by bitter experience, and so there might be some profit in rummaging about in our own all-too-recent intellectual past...

...In the event of conflict, FDR stated in 1936, the only policy for the United States was strict neutrality, "and through example and all legitimate encouragement and assistance to persuade other Nations to return to the ways of peace and good-will...

...But perhaps all that was the product of opportunism and careerism...

...But even if such were the case, could the dictatorship impose the requirement that such intellectuals be enthusiastic, that they raise incantations to the wisdom, morality, providentiality, and historicity of the Dune...

...In 1939 Kuhn himself went to the slammer for having embezzled funds, portions of which were spent on his mistress, a Mrs...

...The liberal Senator from Idaho, William E. Borah, stands as a good example...

...8 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977 The habit of dismissing hard evidence in favor of personal impressions was elevated to a high art by the many British pilgrims who were granted audiences with the Fuehrer...

...Chamberlain, felt that the internal persecution in Germany was in great part the result of the denial to Germany of the rights which every other sovereign nation claims...

...6) From this perspective the correct policy was not to oppose Hitler but to encourage him to throw off the restraints of Versailles...

...launch your organization in America...

...8. Both quotations from Franklin Reid Gannon, The British Press and Germany, 1936-1939 (Oxford, 1971), p. 19...

...12) There are very few really wicked people in the world...

...There were so many Italian intellectuals who saw only virtue in the Dune until 1943, or perhaps (if they were made of sterner stuff or located in the wrong part of Italy) until 1945, that a recitation that attempted to cite them all would be as unkind as it would be tedious...

...Surely intellectuals can be careerists or conformists, and they can be threatened, coerced, cajoled, and seduced...

...Rowse, Appeasement, p. 38...

...The cluster of attitudes towards World War I and its aftermath which existed in the United States existed to an even greater degree in Great Britain--not surprisingly, in view of the losses she had suffered...

...The appeasers in Great Britain wanted peace with Germany, also a noble ideal, and in pursuing it they were willing to distort and suppress facts they found uncomfortable, and to engage in the crudest sophistries to deny that which was growing increasingly apparent...

...Anything which strengthened Germany, therefore, strengthened the West...

...It was natural for Hitler to take Austria," he wrote on one occasion...

...10) One of Dawson's methods was to rewrite or withhold the very accurate stories sent from Berlin by the Times' own correspondent, Norman Ebbutt...

...A year later Lloyd George wrote to a friend of"the admiration which I personally feel for [Hitler...

...French efforts to build alliances against a resurgent Germany, therefore, simply compounded the sins of Versailles instead of atoning for them...

...In 1934 thousands of people crowded into Madison Square Garden to hold a mock trial of Hitler at the end of which the vote to convict was over 20,000 to 1. The lone dissenter, a young woman of courage if not good judgment, was escorted from the building for her own protection...

...Washington remained silent when Hitler announced his plan for rearmament and when Germany took over the Rhineland, and put forward only the miidest protest at the time of Austria's annexation...

...Though Kuhn had insisted that the Bund represented merely an intense form of"Americanism," his group never attracted a mass following...

...It is a doleful tale fat with unhappy implications...

...I do my utmost, night after night," he wrote, "to keep out of the papers anything that might hurt their susceptibilities...

...But few of the surviving Mussolini enthusiasts have ever The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977 9...

...The response in the United States was overwhelmingly antiNazi...

...This thesis was echoed by a number of prominent journalists...

...See Rowse, Appeasement, pp...

...Rowse has written, "until they were throttled black in the face...

...Avowedly pro-Nazi groups sprang up, but they never attracted large numbers...

...Events in Germany were widely reported to the outside world...

...9. A.L...

...Conservatives saw Communism as a greater threat to the West than Nazism, and looked upon Germany as a bulwark against the Red,s...

...For it would only be when Germany had regained the stature and honor she deserved that a lasting foundation of peace could be built...

...He "understood" Hitler's behavior right along, including the annexation of Austria...

...Hitler's savagery was so well-documented that few dared to defend him--openly, at least...

...A few years later one of these voices told him that a young Austrian would overthrow the "Legions of Darkness" and take control of Germany...

...Invited to visit with Hitler, Lloyd George was struck almost to tears when he saw on Hitler's desk one framed photograph--of David Lloyd George...

...77-78...

...and Martha Dodd (eds...

...And of course there was his relentless persecution of Jews, the severity of which increased with each passing year (though the "final solution" awaited the coming of war...

...He assumed this position through legal means, but quickly set about destroying the existing system...

...An examination of American journals and newspapers of the time reveals detailed--and for the most part accurate--coverage of every Nazi excess...