by Ian Kershaw
Speaking to representatives of the German press the day following Reichskristallnacht (though not mentioning the pogrom by a single word), Hitler, in contrast to his views a decade earlier, was contemptuous of the inferior racial quality that he saw in the mixed ethnic population of the United States.40 But he and other Nazi leaders were now beginning to take seriously the prospect of America as a potential future enemy. Hitler spoke in January 1939 of the United States as ‘agitating’ against Germany. Plainly, she ranked by now among ‘the enemies of the Reich’.41 His anger at the reactions to Reichskristallnacht in the United States and paranoia about the power of the Jews in America combined in ever shriller attacks on Roosevelt and the Jewish warmongers allegedly calling the tune.
This formed part of the background to the important speech that Hitler delivered to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, the sixth anniversary of his ‘seizure of power’. At its centre lay the presumed power of the Jews, which Hitler had consistently seen as the dominant force in American government and economic might. The tenor of the speech was an attack on the threat which he saw posed by Jewish finance in Britain and the United States to Germany’s economy and national security. He depicted the Jews as warmongers forcing Germany into a conflict she did not want. Germany was, however, ready to meet the challenge and was prepared for a struggle to the death. And should it come to war–here Hitler offered his own terrible threat–then those who had caused it, the Jews, would perish. The result would be ‘the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe’.42
When, the day after Hitler’s baleful speech, Roosevelt implied that the threat of Hitler meant America’s frontiers now lay on the Rhine (a figure of speech he had used to justify the delivery of planes to France), it produced a veritable barrage of assaults in the German press.43 This was a prelude to Hitler’s frontal attack on Roosevelt in his Reichstag speech at the end of April.
Roosevelt, though, as we have seen, handicapped in his scope for action by domestic opinion and isolationist clamour against any move that hinted at dragging America into Europe’s travails, had since Munich the previous autumn become ever more concerned about the likelihood of war and about the damaging failure of British and French appeasement policy. The horrors of Reichskristallnacht had then revealed the full barbarity of the Nazi regime. And in mid-March had come the occupation by Hitler’s Wehrmacht of what remained of Czechoslovakia, followed, in early April, by the invasion of Albania by the troops of the other ‘mad dog’, Mussolini. In the days that followed, Roosevelt contemplated a public message that amounted in effect to a personal appeal to Hitler and Mussolini to back away from the path of aggression and war and to demonstrate their sincere commitment to peaceful development in Europe. The message, after numerous redraftings, was published on 15 April 1939. The centrepoint was Roosevelt’s proposal that the Axis dictators should give an assurance that for a period of at least ten years they would attack none of a list of thirty named independent nations, mainly European but also including some in the Middle East. For his part, Roosevelt committed the United States to participation in discussions aimed at reducing armaments and opening up international trade on equal terms to all countries.44
Hitler was infuriated and insulted by what he saw as Roosevelt’s arrogance in a message published before it had even been officially received in Berlin.45 He at first deemed it beneath his dignity to reply to ‘so contemptible a creature’, but, probably because Roosevelt’s speech had evidently made a generally favourable impression upon international opinion, eventually felt that he had to respond.46 When he did so, in a speech to the Reichstag on 28 April, his riposte was withering.47 He had enquired of the thirty named countries, he claimed, and none felt threatened by Germany. Some countries (he mentioned Syria as one), however, had been unable to give a reply because their own freedom of action had been curtailed by the democratic states. And was not Palestine occupied by British, not German troops? The Republic of Ireland, too, feared aggression from Britain, not from Germany. Roosevelt’s appeal to disarmament equally played into Hitler’s hands, since the German dictator had no difficulty in making great capital of the way in which the victorious powers had denuded Germany of armed defences after the First World War while finding no shortage of reasons to avoid disarming themselves.
Hitler’s sarcastic sallies had the assembled tame Nazi Reichstag deputies in fits of laughter. It was one of his most effective speeches. Goebbels was ecstatic. ‘A terrible flogging of Roosevelt. That really smacks him around the ears. The house is bent double with laughing. It’s a pleasure to hear it. The success among the public is immense. Anybody publicly attacking the Führer certainly gets his comeuppance…He’s a genius of political tactics and strategy. Nobody can do it like him. What a pygmy a man like Roosevelt is in comparison.’48 Not only Nazis recognized the effectiveness of Hitler’s rhetoric. William Shirer, an American journalist in Berlin at the time who heard the speech, thought Hitler’s answer to Roosevelt ‘rather shrewd’ in playing upon the sympathies of appeasers and isolationists in America and Europe.49
Beyond such circles, even so, Hitler’s ‘reckoning’ with Roosevelt had little currency. Rather, as it appeared to many, Roosevelt was claiming the moral high ground with an appeal to reason and peace in the face of proven aggressive intent. The impact of the speech, and of Roosevelt’s intervention that had provoked it, was in any case of passing importance. What was significant was that the divide between the United States and Germany had been exposed in the most visible fashion. It was clear where the United States stood in the conflict between the democracies and the Axis powers.
From the German perspective, whatever the appearances of neutrality, the United States had to be regarded as essentially a hostile power. This meant that, after years of near irrelevance in German policy formation, the United States had now to be viewed strategically, not just ideologically. The key issue in the event–ever more probable–of European war in the foreseeable future was to ensure that America did not enter the conflict. In German thinking, however, this was not likely; there was no undue cause for concern. A presidential election was due in autumn 1940. No risks would be taken with public opinion before then. In any case, the force of isolationism ruled out intervention. And, beyond that, American military weakness was only too evident, with rearmament and industrial war production merely in their beginnings. German planning was indeed reckoning with a long war, or series of wars. But the early stages, it was presumed, would rapidly prove victorious before the United States was in any position to intervene. Hitler was confident that war with Poland, when it came, would be swiftly decided by German force of arms. He expected the western democracies to stay out of any military action against Poland. But, should they intervene, he again had no doubt that Germany would prevail. The western democracies, Britain as well as France, would be defeated, or would concede in a negotiated settlement in the face of overwhelming German military supremacy. The Americans would stay aloof. The future showdown with ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ would follow at some stage with the backing, or at least the quiescence, of the west European powers. And this, too, would be over quickly. Conflict with the United States at some point in the future–not before the mid-1940s at the earliest–would be on the basis of a Germany dominating the whole of the European continent, and by this time with a mighty battle-fleet ready to contest control over the oceans.
This remained mere nebulous musing. But the central assumption, as war loomed ever closer in the summer of 1939, was broadly–and the thinking was still inchoate rather than concisely worked out–that Germany would have established her ascendancy in Europe before the United States became a factor of major strategic significance.
II
Even so, nothing could be taken for granted. As war began in Europe in September 1939, Hitler was acutely aware that he had only a limited period of time to achieve supremacy in Europe before American military and industrial potential would start to make itself felt in the conflict. Increasingly, America
now had to be reckoned with. Speed was more than ever of the essence. Germany had to be victorious before American intervention could tip the balance.
Though Hitler was convinced that there was little prospect of an early entry of the United States into the war, he wanted to take no chances. Nothing was to be done to offer undue provocation. Attacks on President Roosevelt in the German press, commonplace and venomous in the months preceding the war, now ceased on orders from Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda. The press was instructed to apply absolute discretion in reporting on American affairs.50 Hitler also reined in the gung-ho naval leadership, anxious to unleash their U-boats even at the risk of sinking neutral American ships. More than once in the autumn, Hitler insisted to the Commander-in-Chief of the navy, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, that everything should be done to avoid naval incidents with the United States. On 23 February 1940 he categorically refused permission to Raeder for two submarines to patrol waters off the Canadian coast, near Halifax, Nova Scotia, a crucial port for British convoys, because of ‘the psychological effect that any such step might have in the United States’. In early March, the navy received explicit orders banning the stopping, capturing or sinking of any American ships, wherever they might be.51
German military prognoses in autumn 1939 reckoned that there might be a period of grace lasting no longer than a year and a half before the industrial and military potential of America would begin to make itself felt. An analysis by the High Command of the Wehrmacht concluded that, for the time being, the United States could just about manage to meet the demands of her own armed forces and would need about a year to start producing large numbers of planes, tanks and other military vehicles. But after around one to one and a half years, there would be ‘a level of productivity in all spheres of armaments which far outstretches all other countries’.52 This assessment accorded with that of reports from the German military attaché in Washington that the state of military preparation in the United States ruled out any intervention before the late summer of 1940, but that thereafter a full American participation in the war was possible.53 The German embassy in Washington took the view that Roosevelt’s administration was reckoning with a long war, did not expect a rapid defeat of Britain and France and would intervene in the event of the democracies either facing disaster or, alternatively, approaching victory. The necessary popular support for intervention would be created, it was presumed.54
Hitler’s sense of urgency to complete the military defeat of France and force the British to a negotiated settlement from a position of weakness becomes all the more understandable in the light of such reports. At the beginning of the war, he had expressed his confidence that he would have ‘solved all problems in Europe’ long before the Americans could intervene. But privately he had added: ‘woe betide us if we’re not finished by then.’55 As Poland lay prostrate, only a few weeks later, he urged an immediate attack on France on the grounds that time was running against Germany, militarily and economically.56 And just before the start of the western offensive in May 1940 he justified his move to his friend Mussolini by pointing to ‘the recurring undertone of threats in Mr. Roosevelt’s telegrams, notes, and inquiries’ as providing ‘ample reason for seeing to it that the war is brought to an end as soon as possible’.57
On the very day that Italy declared war, 10 June 1940, President Roosevelt had publicly avowed to ‘extend to the opponents of force’ the material resources of the United States.58 Just over a month later, an analysis Hitler received of a speech by Roosevelt, delivered (in accepting the Democratic nomination for the forthcoming presidential election) on 19 July, made plain that the American President stood resolutely opposed to Germany and ready to back Britain in a continued struggle.59 The implications for Germany’s war were evident: it had to be won quickly and conclusively before American resources–and possibly direct intervention–could tell. Hitler drew his conclusion. The signals from across the Atlantic influenced the decision which he announced at the end of the month to his generals: to prepare to attack and defeat the Soviet Union in a ‘lightning war’ of a mere few months. The war he had always been ideologically determined to fight now had a vital strategic purpose: ending British hopes of any Continental ally, thereby forcing Britain to accept the inevitable and come to terms; and, by so doing, removing the threat of American intervention. London and Washington had, as it were, to be defeated via Moscow.
Hitler’s strategy had become global in its dimensions. It now reached out to the role of Japan in the Far East. Defeat of the Soviet Union by the Wehrmacht would free Japan from any threat from her old enemy to the north. It would open up the way which Japan was already deliberating: a move to the south, implying an attack on British possessions in the Far East, with the further desired effect of keeping the Americans occupied in the Pacific. Within weeks, the new interest in Japan had led to the moves to that eventually culminated in the Tripartite Pact of 27 September 1940 and underpinned Ribbentrop’s short-lived hopes of constructing a new world order aimed at undermining British world power and the international strength of the United States.60
Meanwhile, the destroyer deal concluded between Churchill and Roosevelt in early September had given Hitler the most tangible indication of America’s increasing support for the undefeated Britain. The hawkish Admiral Raeder now imagined American entry into the war to be a certainty.61 But the emerging Atlantic alliance which the destroyer deal symbolized, and the visibly anti-German tenor of the American administration, had to be swallowed. Still Hitler wanted no provocation. Firm restrictions were placed upon the press reportage in Germany.62
The lifting of the restraint on anti-American propaganda followed in the wake of Roosevelt’s press conference on 17 December (where he used the metaphor of lending a neighbour a garden hose to put out a fire to introduce what would soon materialize as the policy of lend-lease), then his ‘arsenal of democracy’ speech near the end of the month.63 Taking the gloves off in the propaganda war was a reflection of how seriously the move to introduce lend-lease was viewed by the Nazi regime. Admiral Raeder, keen as ever to exploit the latest development to push for greater naval aggression in the Atlantic, emphasized the implications of lend-lease to Hitler on 27 December. His conclusion, that ‘very strong support will be forthcoming [for Britain] only by the end of 1941 or the beginning of 1942’,64 underlined what Hitler himself had told Jodl ten days earlier: that Germany had to establish her Continental dominance by the end of 1941, before America could intervene. A memorandum composed on 9 January by Hans Dieckhoff, the former ambassador to the United States, who had come to be regarded as an expert on America in the German Foreign Ministry, outlined the seriousness of the implications. He pointed out that it would be a mistake to believe that the United States’ entry into the war would not change the situation. In such an event, industrial production would increase sharply, allowing greater supplies of arms, munitions and planes to be made available to Britain. Without American intervention, a British collapse offered the prospect of a peace settlement and an end to the war. ‘If, however, the United States is also in the war,’ Dieckhoff added, ‘then, even if England collapses, the war against the United States will continue, and it will be difficult to arrive at a peace.’65 It was about as far as a senior diplomat could go in implying that American involvement in the war–seen as increasingly likely, now all the more so in the light of lend-lease–would mean a German victory could not be won. The implication was reinforced a month later by a report from the German military attaché in the Washington embassy, General Friedrich von Bötticher, estimating that American production of warplanes would triple in the course of 1941. By that time the rate of production would have overtaken Germany’s own.66
Publicly, Hitler resorted to threats, a device he frequently used, though now, for the first time perhaps, deployed from a position, at least as far as the United States was concerned, approaching weakness. Speaking in the Reichstag on 30 January 1941, the eighth anniversary of his ‘seizure of
power’, he declared: ‘No one should be under any illusion. Anyone who believes he can help England must know one thing above all: every ship, with or without escort, that comes within range of our torpedoes will be torpedoed!’67 It was a threat he did not dare implement for fear of provoking exactly what he was still wanting at all costs to avoid. More important than this still empty threat was the strategic conclusion that Hitler privately drew from the moves towards lend-lease.
