1.1.1 First Impressions (1918–1923)

Thanks to recent research by Brendan Simms we are in a position to put a date on the first contact between Gefreiter Hitler and representatives of the American nation: after his regiment’s first brush with a US Army unit near Rheims on 17 July 1918, he was detailed to drop off two POWs at the field headquarters of the Twelfth Royal Bavarian Infantry Brigade.Footnote ⁴ We do not know what (if anything) transpired between them along the way, but a reference made in a public speech nine years later as likely as not refers to this encounter.Footnote ⁵ Hitler alleged that those captured Americans – most probably because one or both of them still spoke German – served as a powerful reminder to him of the net loss which foreign migration to America had meant for pre-war Germany. Whether coincidentally or not, one of the very first public speeches he had given while still employed as a political agitator by the Reichswehr in post-revolutionary Munich also appears to have addressed this issueFootnote ⁶ – the net loss which pre-war Germany had sustained through migration.Footnote ⁷ By December 1919, he was quoting the United States in one breath with Britain whenever he lashed out at the enemy alliance that kept defeated Germany pinned to the ground. This is not altogether surprising since these early speeches – not all of which survive – still often fit the mould of orthodox right-wing German opinion in 1919–21 on the USA and President Wilson in particular. According to this discourse, the US President had entered the war in 1917 to save the Allies from an increasingly likely defeat and, by extension, American banks from financial ruin.Footnote ⁸ Wilson then mischievously ‘tricked’ the Germans into opening armistice talks by the apparent generosity of the Fourteen Points peace offer he put forward in January 1918, thus leaving Germany prostrate before the victors at Versailles.Footnote ⁹

While it is true that these broadsides against the victors of 1918 were sometimes accompanied by harsh personal expletive, Hitler saved most of his venom for the German politicians who, according to him, had done the Allies’ dirty work for them.Footnote ¹⁰ The US President, on the other hand, he sometimes granted a degree of grudging respect, for pulling off such a feat.Footnote ¹¹ The fact that the US Senate had refused to approve the country’s membership of the League of Nations was also something Hitler felt stood in contrast to the undignified behaviour of the German political class in trying to be accepted into that august body.Footnote ¹² American legislation aimed at keeping Native Americans and African Americans in a state of segregation and at stemming the influx of non-white immigrants into the country was another thing Hitler could approve of.Footnote ¹³

It needs to be stressed, however, that these judgements, while noteworthy, did not stand at the heart of Hitler’s image of the USA in the early 1920s. Even at this early stage of his career, the one thing he was most consistent about was his anti-Semitism. Even though to him the United States was a country run on material greed, he appeared willing to discriminate between ordinary Americans and the Jewish money-lending class which supposedly was in the process of usurping that country’s government.Footnote ¹⁴ The America of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries he described as ‘an evolving civilisation’, which was now being progressively corrupted by the ‘Jews of Wall Street’.Footnote ¹⁵ Even the country’s entry into World War I was something he was willing to put down to the influences of British propaganda and ‘the Jewish media of America’, which had, after all, pulled off ‘a real masterpiece: to goad a people both numerous and peaceful which cared as much about the struggle in Europe as it did about the North Pole, to join the most cruel war ever for the sake of “culture”.’Footnote ¹⁶

It is difficult to ascertain whether this set of prejudices already amounted to a sort of programme that included the blueprint for a future American–German confrontation. Some recent research points to the possibility that Hitler’s anti-Semitism may in fact have originated from the perceived need to remove an imagined Jewish barrier standing between a resurgent German Right and a no-holds-barred struggle against Anglo–American capitalism.Footnote ¹⁷ There is some support for this, especially a 1919 speech where the United States is described as an ‘absolute adversary’ and thus placed ahead even of the hereditary enemy, France;Footnote ¹⁸ in a similar address from May 1920 the future dictator makes a point of discriminating between those foreign powers whose enmity is incidental and arguably a consequence of foolish pre-1914 policies (Russia is mentioned in this context) and those which have to be seen as sworn enemies of the German Reich (France, Great Britain and the USA).Footnote ¹⁹ Over and above this, both a draft and a manuscript from 1923, point to a reason for this ranking that might go beyond raving anti-Semitism. According to these, Hitler had taken careful note of the failure – unique among the great powers of the time – of any kind of socialist party to establish a major foothold within the body politic of the United States.Footnote ²⁰ To him, this was a crucial issue, because this was arguably the only political force that had had the power to stop war in 1914 and, in the German case, actually did so in 1918, with consequences that led directly to Versailles. The Americans’ apparent immunity to this kind of threat was something that left him deeply impressed.Footnote ²¹

1.1.2 Reading Matter

Hitler read voraciously, albeit in an unsystematic fashion that tended to favour biographies and military history. Unlike Stalin, he would only occasionally jot down marginal notes in the pages of books, making it difficult for the latter-day researcher to discriminate among the books which he read, just skimmed over or merely owned.Footnote ²² The ranks of the third category were swollen by numerous gifts from admirers, which in many cases went straight onto the shelves of his main libraries in Berlin, Munich and Berchtesgaden, never to be touched again by the recipient’s hand.Footnote ²³ As a rule of thumb, the likelihood of Hitler devoting serious time to a book must have decreased considerably with every year he spent in power. The 1920s, on the other hand, have to be seen as a key period in two senses. First, his mind was still open to some new ideas and his view of the world had not yet hardened into a set of prejudices.Footnote ²⁴ Second, the leisure enforced on him by his prison sentence (November 1923–December 1924) and the following period of languishing political fortunes meant that, by force of circumstance, he had plenty of time on his hands.Footnote ²⁵

Erwin Rosen’s Amerikaner is a ninety-page booklet issued by a popular German publisher in 1920;Footnote ²⁶ its author – a well-travelled German who had lived in the USA in the 1890s – sought to explain to his readers the mentality of the average American citizen and how this had contributed to making the USA both a land of plenty and an economic superpower. We are lucky in having a source which confirms that Hitler read this book while serving his sentence in Landsberg prison. In a letter by Rudolf Heβ to his family dated 19 May 1924, he refers to Hitler ‘devouring’ Rosen’s book.Footnote ²⁷ Since our image of Hitler is that of a man notorious for taking on board other views only if they tended to reinforce his own prejudices, the obvious expectation is for Amerikaner to be a rabidly anti-American diatribe peppered with racist and anti-Semitic slurs. Closer examination reveals it to be an account that is not just completely devoid of the obligatory rants against President Wilson so prevalent among German political publications of the time, but also characterised by a surprisingly friendly attitude towards American society. The average American is described as having a healthy zest for life and hard work. Americans’ constant proclamations of their country’s greatness, while grating to European ears, are increasingly being borne out by reality, the author asserts. Their almost childlike naivete coexists side by side with a ‘zeal for action’ passed down from one generation to the next, which manifests itself in snappy decision-making and a ‘violent passion for competition’.Footnote ²⁸ Where politics are concerned, two points stand out, which Hitler undoubtedly would have agreed with. Rosen stresses that irrespective of flowery rhetoric, American politicians will never hesitate to put the interests of their country before those of the League of Nations. Second – especially in the context of worldwide events at the time that Hitler was reading the bookFootnote ²⁹ – working-class Americans, who are constantly seeking to improve their lot by making the most of the opportunities available to them, have proven completely immune to the temptations of communist ideology.Footnote ³⁰

A year or two after reading Rosen, Hitler settled down to a book of a completely different ilk. Madison Grant (1865–1937) was a well-connected eugenicist from an old New York family, who agitated throughout the early 1900s against mixed marriages and for a limitation of immigration quotas. This effort peaked with his role in collecting the data that underpinned the 1924 Federal Immigration Act. This law fixed quotas that all but ruled out East Asian immigration, sharply reduced the numbers allowed to East European Jews and Italians, while favouring others (like Germans) seen as more desirable. A prolific writer, Grant’s most influential work by far was The Passing of the Great Race (1916), which was translated into a number of languages, with the German edition coming out in early 1925. Grant essentially stood Darwinist theory on its head by insisting that throughout history the ‘Nordic’ race, while consistently victorious in its march of conquest through most of Europe and the Middle East, had invariably succumbed to its inferior, but more numerous subject peoples. In recent centuries, conflagrations like the Thirty Years War and the Great War had meant that the Nordic countries involved had suffered demographic setbacks they could ill afford. As a result, Germany could no longer be counted in the front ranks of the purely Nordic nations: only between 9 and 19 million of its people were, according to Grant, still worthy of the label ‘Nordic’. The United States, he insisted, was still reasonably safe by virtue of the fact that the state rested on solid racial foundations put down in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the first substantial waves of migrants to cross the Atlantic were composed of individuals from northern European countries. Even so, the aforementioned historical pattern would assert itself, without protection from new legislation that saw to both the limitation of immigration and the sterilisation of the unfit.

The extent of Grant’s influence on Hitler’s thinking is difficult to assess because broadly similar ideas were being put forward at the time by other commentators.Footnote ³¹ However, we do know that Hitler referred to Grant and his thinking on at least one occasion in a major speech and even bowed to the harsh judgement Grant had made about Germany’s deteriorating Nordic status.Footnote ³² In a key paragraph in the unpublished Second Book Hitler fully integrated into his ideology the notion of the constantly victorious, yet equally constantly threatened Nordic race on its march through history.Footnote ³³ In further speeches he fully echoed Grant’s thinking about the wasteful losses endured by both countries on the battlefields of World War I and even adopted an unflattering (and to a German public of the time, probably strangely unintelligible) comparison between the USA and Mexico that Grant had used to illustrate the baleful consequences of racial intermarriage. Finally, he wrote Grant a letter in which he thanked him effusively and described The Passing of the Great Race as his bible.Footnote ³⁴ While Grant’s influence on Hitler is key in the sense that his theory probably encouraged Hitler to transfer his racial ideology to a continental scale, he also nurtured in him a view of the United States which broadly speaking took into account the fact that it was a country of considerable demographic and economic potential. That Hitler should have arrived at this conclusion at least in part by the roundabout route of his racial pseudoscience did not make this assessment any less accurate.

1.1.3 Public and Private Statements, Mein Kampf and the Second Book, 1924–1933

Of all the value judgements that Hitler ever made about the USA, those that have endured the longest have been the anti-Semitic and racist diatribes of the wartime years. They are confirmed by the impressions of a few of his fellow travellers, such as Fritz Wiedemann and Ernst Hanfstaengl. The latter wrote in 1970 that ‘to Hitler the US apparently was nothing more than a country ruled by gangsters, corrupt politicians and Jews and where public order – such as it was – was determined by the rate of kidnappings, stock exchange crashes and millions of unemployed’.Footnote ³⁵ This chapter will attempt to explore why these statements stand in such contrast to other, much less well-publicised ones.

At no other time since joining the Bavarian Army in 1914 was Hitler better able to make the most of (admittedly enforced) leisure than during the incarceration after the failed coup attempt of November 1923. He greatly benefitted from the fact that existing legislation allowed him to serve his time under a privileged regime of Festungshaft reserved to political detainees.Footnote ³⁶ Especially after he and a number of accomplices were moved to the fortress of Landsberg, treatment can only be described as a pale reflection of what awaited ordinary inmates of the German prison system of the time. This was compounded by the obvious sympathy with which the warden of the institution and the guards treated their famous charges; they were allowed regular visits from the outside, unlimited access to books and newspapers and showered with culinary gifts from admirers all over Germany. Cells were not locked in daytime and the inmates were allowed to wander around their wing and even the prison gardens at will. Hitler put on weight and began work on the manuscript that would become Mein Kampf.Footnote ³⁷ Of the seven co-conspirators who had been sent to Landsberg at the same time as Hitler, the one closest to him was probably Rudolf Heβ. Destined to become world-famous by his flight to Scotland in May 1941 and forty-year-long post-war imprisonment in Spandau, he had joined the newly founded NSDAP in July 1920 and soon turned into one of its most zealous agitators. By 1922–3, he had become one of the individuals closest to Hitler. After spending a few months on the run from the authorities, he turned himself in and joined his beloved Tribun in Landsberg, where he was delighted to find him in excellent shape.Footnote ³⁸ The extent to which the much better educated Heβ played a marginal or major role in the writing of Mein Kampf is irrelevant in this context;Footnote ³⁹ what is important is that the two grew even closer than they had been before the coup, thus laying the foundation for Heβ’s being made Deputy Führer after he left Landsberg. Together with the hotel-like, but still somewhat cramped living conditions at Landsberg, this would give Heβ a unique glimpse into Hitler’s reflections on the world around him. In a draft letter dated 9 April 1924, Heβ reflected on Hitler’s broad range of interests, including technical processes aimed at facilitating human progress. In a recent conversation, the future Führer had dwelt at length on the successes which the Ford Motor Company had achieved in the mass production of cars.Footnote ⁴⁰ In view of Henry Ford’s by then well-known anti-Semitism, the historian would be justified in assuming that it was the US magnate’s prejudices, rather than his latest industrial achievements, that had attracted Hitler’s attention. In the following weeks and months, however, Hitler would return to the subject of the American way of life time and again. On 16 May, Heβ again summarised many of Hitler’s musings, this time for the benefit of his mother. Among the subjects singled out for special attention was the future of the motor car as the main means of transport for the working class ‘as in America’, Germany still being many years away from such a state of affairs.Footnote ⁴¹ On 27 May, Heβ reported a conversation where Hitler had dwelt in considerable detail on the latest rage from America as far as architecture was concerned – skyscrapers. Hitler even expressed a desire to have the NSDAP’s new party headquarters installed in such a building, as a deliberate snub to the Theutschvölkischen within the movement, as he put it.Footnote ⁴² On 16 June 1924, Heβ – apparently for the first time – appended to one of the letters he sent his fiancée a virtual word-by-word record of a monologue by Hitler. Again, the subject was the need to make wider use of available technology to ease the travails of day-to-day life, a task Hitler saw as the defining challenge for his generation. He went so far as to state that it was necessary to treat the United States as an example to be followed (‘Man soll sich ein Beispiel an Amerika nehmen’).Footnote ⁴³ German car manufacturers demanding a rise in tariffs in order to gain some protection from US competitors should be told to work harder and achieve similar results. In a different context, even the American Yellowstone Park was praised as a model institution which Germany would do well to emulate.Footnote ⁴⁴

Otto Wagener was a relative newcomer to Hitler’s court.Footnote ⁴⁵ A veteran of World War I and the post-war Freikorps, he came from a well-off background and supported various far-right causes in the 1920s. Starting in 1927, some of his wartime comrades who had joined the Nazi cause encouraged him to attend speeches and rallies. Finally, during the August 1929 rally of the NSDAP in Nürnberg, the head of the SA, Oskar Pfeffer von Salomon, a good friend from his Freikorps days, introduced him to Hitler. It appears that he was made the offer to join the party and become Pfeffer von Salomon’s chief of staff more or less on the spot. When a year later Hitler and Pfeffer had a massive falling out, which led to the latter tendering his resignation, Wagener decided to stay. In early 1931 he made room for a new appointee as SA chief of staff: Ernst Röhm, a member of the NSDAP’s old guard, who had just returned from a stint in Bolivia as a soldier of fortune. A move that appeared to relegate Wagener to the sidelines actually brought him closer to Hitler. He volunteered to set up a cell within the NSDAP’s leadership that would have as its sole remit the study of the problems afflicting the German economy. His experience as a manager of several companies before 1929 gave him a modicum of expert knowledge in the subject. As luck would have it, the NSDAP’s central offices were just in the process of moving house to the newly built Braunes Haus in Munich and, whether by chance or by design, Wagener ended up in an office next door to Hitler’s. The latter took a liking to his fellow southerner, included him in his retinue and repeatedly asked him to accompany him on the numerous trips he made all over Germany.

By the spring of 1932, Wagener had developed a political theory based on the progressive evolution of private companies into entities collectively owned by their most productive workers. Sketchy at best (and in all likelihood, completely impractical), this theory soon lost ground to voices within the NSDAP leadership who advocated a close cooperation with private industry, with a view to attaining political power. In September 1932, Wagener resigned his position and for a few months acted as a political lobbyist for the party in Berlin. From April to June 1933, after the NSDAP’s seizure of power, he briefly held the ill-defined position of Reich commissioner for the economy until he fell foul of his rival Göring. He lost all power and never returned to politics. His relevance to this account lies in the fact that while a POW in British hands, he spent much of 1945–6 rewriting from memory diaries he had kept throughout much of the 1929–33 period. They consist of a chronologically arranged series of sixty-two anecdotal snapshots, usually revolving around a particular incident or conversation, often (though by no means always) with Hitler at its centre.Footnote ⁴⁶ Where he describes events subject to verification half a century later, his account is remarkably accurate. The fact that we know for certain that he was part of Hitler’s close retinue for most of the January 1931–September 1932 period gives this source additional credibility. Some of the differences of opinion on economics he records between himself and the future Führer ring true; they tally with what we know about the controversies within the party at the time about what economic policy to espouse – a subject area on which Nazi dogma had so far been vague. As already stated, Wagener had a stake in these discussions, which might make him a less than absolutely faithful chronicler of the exchanges.Footnote ⁴⁷ However, even though he claims to have made several unsuccessful attempts to steer Hitler away from confrontation with the USSR, he appears to have been non-committal on the subject of the USA. What his record does reflect is that throughout the summer of 1931 and possibly as late as 1933 he and Hitler had several exchanges during which the latter dwelt at some length on the future role of the United States in world politics.Footnote ⁴⁸ In Hitler’s view, the USA was preordained to pursue a policy of expansion in order to meet the problem of industrial overproduction. This issue had if anything been exacerbated and not alleviated by the Great Depression then enveloping the world.Footnote ⁴⁹ The only way to check this in the long term would be for Europe to form a union under German leadership, after having brought the Ukraine into the fold with a view to acquiring self-sufficiency in raw materials. Should Europe fail to do this, the USA could not fail eventually to establish a global hegemony.Footnote ⁵⁰ Hitler was willing to concede that President Roosevelt might sincerely be pursuing economic recovery as a means to restore prosperity to the masses hit by the Depression. But he prophesised that the President would fail in this endeavour and would ultimately turn to war in order to vanquish permanently any economic competitors.Footnote ⁵¹ Nor did the world of racial politics provide any solace for this bleak outlook. Hitler freely acknowledged that the Nordic element predominated in the United States and that there was little doubt that in due course the Americans too would become one people.Footnote ⁵²

References to the United States and its people are far from infrequent in Mein Kampf, the two-volume programmatic diatribe Hitler wrote in Landsberg and in the months after his release.Footnote ⁵³ However, they are not assembled in a coherent way that might point the reader towards the future shape of US–German relations; instead, they stand on their own. What is important is the fact that nearly all of them express admiration or even awe at American achievements. A case in point is a paragraph in the second volume discussing the proliferation of technical innovations coming out of the USA. According to the future dictator’s interpretation, this had to be seen as the direct result of a culture of social mobility that allowed people of modest means to reap the reward of their labours, thus creating a powerful incentive for individuals from all walks of life to put their minds to work in a manner that would benefit both them and the state.Footnote ⁵⁴ Other features of the inter-war United States also meet with his approval – its sheer size for one thing. In contrast to the British and French empires, whose size was mostly underpinned by vulnerable overseas territories, the USA boasted an enormous and unmatched continental ‘base’ with just a few overseas possessions.Footnote ⁵⁵ To Hitler this alone was enough to rule out a future European war against the enemies of 1914, aimed at re-establishing Germany’s borders of 1914. The way he saw it, even a successful conclusion of such a war would leave Germany still struggling to outflank Britain or ‘match the size of the [American] Union’.Footnote ⁵⁶ It was with some glee, however, that he looked forward to the intensification of US–British rivalries over commerce and naval supremacy, since such a conflict was likely to ‘doom England’ unless backed by a major ally.Footnote ⁵⁷ Finally, Hitler paid Washington the highest imaginable accolade. The Americans’ long tradition of shunning marriages with ‘lesser races’,Footnote ⁵⁸ along with the new legislation that all but barred migration by Asians and considerably lowered the quotas for Eastern Europeans,Footnote ⁵⁹ showed that they were engaged in a serious attempt at preventing ‘the lowering of the quality of their race’.Footnote ⁶⁰

Hitler continued to observe American affairs carefully from afar. In the original edition of Mein Kampf the wording hinted at the likelihood that the Americans’ endeavour to maintain the numerical supremacy of the Nordic races in their country would be doomed in the long run. In the 1930 edition, however, a minor but important amendment indicated that the author had reached the conclusion that the struggle for Nordic supremacy in the USA was still open-ended.Footnote ⁶¹

Hitler developed these ideas over the years, and by the time he sat down to write the Second Book,Footnote ⁶² they formed the groundwork for an entire chapter exclusively dedicated to the USA.Footnote ⁶³ In it, and in contrast to most other spokesmen for the far Right in Germany at the time, Hitler did not merely bemoan the cultural encroachment symbolised by US feature films and jazz bands, but reflected on the reasons behind this budding hegemony. To him neither mere numbers nor the size of the country could explain this success. Echoing Grant, he stressed that the key factor was the racial homogeneity and hence compatibility of the bulk of the migrants, who in any case constituted the pick of their generation.Footnote ⁶⁴ This fact was reflected both in the daring they exhibited by the mere decision to migrate and in their emergence at the top of the ensuing Darwinist scramble for resources that the expansion of the white settlers across the continent had entailed. The combination of this quality of Menschenmaterial (human resources) with the sheer extent of land capable of development accounted for the country’s unique potential. However, Hitler was not carried away by the romantic image of settlers engaged in a perpetual struggle against Native Americans and the untameable wilderness – an image that had in any case belonged to the past for two generations. Instead, and harking back to his reflections on the subject in Landsberg, he singled out the future of the car industry as an image to impress upon his readers the pointlessness of engaging the USA in peaceful competition for markets. To him, the motorisation of modern society was ‘an issue of immeasurable importance for the future’.Footnote ⁶⁵ The 1920s had seen US car production multiply many times over, with European producers struggling to stay in the race. In Hitler’s view, this was an exercise in futility, since the size of the US domestic market enabled American car producers to implement economies of scale that would always allow them to out-produce and outbid competitors. The same logic was applicable to any other industry. Hitler made light of the idea that a long-term European union would be enough to meet the USA on anything like equal terms. This would be possible only under the leadership of a powerful hegemon and after legislation similar to that of the 1924 US Immigration Law had been implemented across the European continent. Failure to bring about such a state of affairs, he stressed in the conclusion of the manuscript, would lead to ‘the overpowering of the world by the American Union’.Footnote ⁶⁶

The true importance of these private and semi-private musings can only be realised by comparing and contrasting them with the public statements Hitler made around the same time.Footnote ⁶⁷ The first time he reflected on American affairs after the publication of Mein Kampf appears to have been in an article sold as a brochure in February 1926. There he noted that Britain was impaled on the horns of a dilemma: it found itself having to choose between a Japanese and an American alliance; ties of history and kinship suggested the latter, he noted, but it was equally obvious that this would only hurry along the inevitable process whereby the United States would dethrone Britain as the power that still currently ruled the waves – just.Footnote ⁶⁸ On 4 July 1926, he dwelt at length on the tragedy which the immigration – and hence, loss – of millions of Germans to the Americas constituted for the German nation.Footnote ⁶⁹ On 26 March 1927 he returned to the same theme, making it more evocative by mentioning the encounter between himself and American POWs being marched to the rear in 1918.Footnote ⁷⁰ On 6 April 1927 he publicly quoted Grant’s estimate of Germany’s ‘racial deterioration’ and heaped praises upon the new restrictive American Immigration Law, which he compared favourably with the alleged incompetence of the German government in this area.Footnote ⁷¹ On 26 June 1927, he went much further, describing the USA as ‘a pillar of the white race’.Footnote ⁷² On 6 August 1927, he returned to the theme of the net loss which generations of mass migration to the Americas had meant for Germany and again asked his audience to cast their minds back only a few years, to when the German Imperial Army found itself facing more and more former Germans in the ranks of the 1918 American Expeditionary Force (AEF). He also reminded any German toying with the idea of migrating across the Atlantic to escape the spectre of European conflict that the United States was a nation very much born and bred in violence, so much so that he described it as a country conquered according to ‘our’ principles.Footnote ⁷³ On 10 October 1928, while making a general point about Europe’s alleged dearth of arable land, he dwelt at length on the subject of the standard of living Americans were enjoying at the time, irrespective of their almost complete disregard for the social needs of the working class. What is noteworthy is that he freely conceded that individual for individual, Americans were every bit as hardworking and inventive as Germans – a compliment he almost never paid to the people of other nations.Footnote ⁷⁴

In November 1928 American affairs featured in both an article and a speech: the former was a review of current affairs written for the Illustrierter Beobachter, in which he also analysed the recent outcome of the US presidential elections. He ridiculed those German observers who had seen the race exclusively in terms of the implications it was going to have for the future of Prohibition. In his judgement, the only thing that really mattered was that President-elect Hoover had made it unambiguously clear he was willing to protect US industry with high tariffs. Accordingly, neither American ‘economic-imperialist plans’ nor ‘the attempts by US capital to take over and monopolise foreign industries’ was likely to cease.Footnote ⁷⁵ On 30 November 1928 he returned to his old core theme with regards to the USA: generations spent attracting immigrants from Nordic countries and recent legislation which ruthlessly barred from entry the sick, the weak and the criminally disposed put the USA in a position where 100 million Americans would, according to Hitler, always outweigh 1,000 million Russians. It was this simple fact of life that made the USA such a ‘global threat’.Footnote ⁷⁶ On 17 April 1929 he returned to a favourite theme: the preponderance of the ever-growing US car industry and the well-nigh futility of trying to match its output.Footnote ⁷⁷ A speech in Nürnberg delivered on 4 August 1929 stressed the issue of past German migratory waves, which according to him had been nothing but a disastrous drain on the country, and the US legislation to keep out the weak, feeble-minded or racially suspect. It was the combination of the two, Hitler said, that made Washington a ‘never-ending threat’ to Europe.Footnote ⁷⁸

The Great Crash of October 1929, as well as the implementation of the Young Plan so loathed by the German Right, should have put a major dent in Hitler’s admiration for American society. Quite undaunted by this, he continued to dwell on the general topic of US potential. An article dated 29 January 1930 which he wrote for the Völkischer Beobachter had as its topic the Conference on Naval Disarmament, which had started in London a few days previously. However, when he discussed the economic potential behind the naval policy of the great powers, it was the USA that occupied centre stage. That country was blessed with unfathomable resources and populated by ‘a racial selection of Europe’s best which had grown there over centuries’. That ultimate accolade, however, did not stop him from predicting that ‘a dire fate awaited all of Europe if no way could be found to somehow put a stop to the expansionism of America’s economy’.Footnote ⁷⁹ On 1 December 1930, while giving a brief address to Hamburg businessmen, he returned to the theme of US competition. America, he maintained, was both overly rich and engaged in the process of cornering the global market in most, though not (yet) all products.Footnote ⁸⁰ On 25 June 1931, irrespective of the ravages the Depression had made in America, he continued to reflect on the country’s virtually unlimited potential. Demography and geography had created a state that was in the process of elbowing aside European manufacturers in areas of industry they had seen as their own only years before. If some of these industries had been spared so far, it was only because the American competition had not yet found the time to move into them. As a threat to Europe, he went on, the United States rivalled even that bête noire of the Right, the USSR and international communism.Footnote ⁸¹ A speech delivered on 26 January 1932 before a group of Ruhr industrialists appears to have been the last occasion prior to the forming of his government on which he discussed the threat posed by American capitalism.Footnote ⁸² The speech was weighted to favour themes where National Socialists and captains of industry would struggle the least to find common ground, and hence dwelt at length on the internal and external threats posed by Soviet-style communism. Even here, however, he managed to slip in a paragraph on the unique nature of the challenge posed by the Amerikanische Union. As he saw it, the unique nature of this phenomenon was defined by two characteristics: first, the economies of scale enjoyed by the USA, which were permanently beyond the reach of any European nation; second, the fact that the sheer size of the American domestic market should really obviate the need for any kind of export-oriented economy, thus strongly suggesting the latter was somehow tied up with a higher aggressive design.Footnote ⁸³

Hitler’s thoughts on the USA during this period are noteworthy for two reasons. First, there is a remarkable coincidence between statements made in private conversation, semi-private musings in his Second Book and statements which he made for the record in public speeches. Second, this was before the murderous anti-Semitism of his government (1933–41) and the success of his policy of aggression (1938–41) brought him into increasing conflict with the United States and forced him first to seek to assuage and then to confront an increasingly hostile reaction from the USA.Footnote ⁸⁴ During this earlier period of the 1920s and early 1930s, he was able to speak with much greater freedom.

1.1.4 Input from Individuals with Access to Hitler

Ernst Hanfstaengl was very much the odd man out in the ranks of the alte Kämpfer (literally, ‘old fighters’), NSDAP militants who had joined the party or the SA well before 1933.Footnote ⁸⁵ He came from an affluent background, was American on his mother’s side and had studied at Harvard from 1905 to 1909, where he made the acquaintance of the young Franklin Delano Roosevelt, among others. Even more strikingly – in view of the premium placed by the National Socialists on the Fronterlebnis (‘fraternity of the trenches’) – he then sat out World War I in New York, where he managed the family’s art gallery from 1911 to 1920. On his return to Munich he attended a speech by Hitler for the first time in November 1922 and emerged mesmerised. Over the following year he found himself increasingly drawn into the orbit of Hitler’s social circle. Though a gifted piano player whose renditions of Wagner appeared to touch a chord in Hitler, other reasons seem to have played a part too. At the time, the fledgling NSDAP had barely any other members who could boast the affluence or cosmopolitan background of Hanfstaengl. The former, his affluence, would pay for a new printing press for the Völkischer Beobachter; his cosmopolitan background turned him into a sort of unofficial spokesman capable of handling occasional interview requests by foreign media representatives. At the same time, he introduced Hitler to a small but growing number of individuals from Munich’s high society, who would be the beginning of a network of sympathisers in high places. By the spring and summer of 1923, irrespective of the fact that Hanfstanegl was not even a party member, the two men were meeting almost daily.Footnote ⁸⁶

The collapse of the November 1923 coup against the Weimar Republic revealed his commitment to the Nazi cause as somewhat lukewarm, however. After returning from a brief exile in Austria, he devoted himself to academic studies, gaining a history PhD in the process. Even though his villa continued to be a popular meeting point for Hitler and a select few of the NSDAP’s leadership in the late 1920s, it took the NSDAP’s landslide victory in the September 1930 elections to revive Hanfstaengl’s interest in politics. The party’s change in fortunes brought a sudden surge in interest from foreign journalists. Since most party VIPs lacked the language skills – or for that matter, charm or manners – to be trusted with an interview situation, Hitler himself decided that somebody of Hanfstaengl’s background was needed as a go-between and coach.Footnote ⁸⁷ This position he fulfilled in an informal fashion from September 1930. By the end of 1931, the decision was made to turn it into an official full-time position; he was given a salary, an office staff and the mission to ‘sell’ the idea of a National Socialist Germany to the outside world. From then onwards he became the point of contact for eminent foreign journalists like Louis P. Lochner, Sefton Delmer, John Gunther, Karl von Wiegand, Djuna Barnes and Dorothy Thompson, who were trying to secure an interview with Hitler or some other party bigwig.Footnote ⁸⁸ By far his greatest coup involved a reversal of roles: he secured an interview with William Randolph Hearst, who was taking a cure at a southern German spa in August 1934. This was followed by a much-publicised audience for the American newspaper baron at Hitler’s Reichskanzlei.Footnote ⁸⁹ The triumph proved to be short-lived, however: in trying to ensure tolerable working conditions for foreign journalists – if nothing else – he emerged as a voice of moderation and this made him increasingly vulnerable at Hitler’s court. In October 1934, Hanfstaengl fell from grace after losing out to a rival in an intrigue.Footnote ⁹⁰ He was banished from Hitler’s circle and fled Germany in February 1937.

While there is no doubt that Hanfstaengl threw himself heart and soul into the task of presenting an acceptable face of the NSDAP and its Führer to foreign journalists, we know much less about the extent to which he managed to influence Hitler with his particular views on the USA. According to his post-war memoirs, he did try to impress upon him the need for a ‘rational’ relationship with the United States, which would preclude a repeat of the gratuitous clash of 1917–18. But he freely concedes that he only stirred Hitler’s interest when talk turned to subjects of a very specific, rather than fundamental nature.Footnote ⁹¹ In the absence of other sources, it is thus impossible to assert that Hanfstaengl was a major influence on Hitler’s views on the USA.Footnote ⁹² The extent and success of his attempts in that direction must remain speculative.

From February 1933 to January 1938 Hitler’s most senior and influential military advisor was his war minister (Reichswehrminister), General der Infanterie Werner von Blomberg.Footnote ⁹³ He has gone down in history as the man instrumental in ‘handing the Wehrmacht to Hitler’ as well as for his ignominious fall after marrying a young lady of ill repute in January 1938.Footnote ⁹⁴ Military historians know him as an open-minded individual who was keen to integrate civilian agencies and ideas into the war of the future. Until the eve of Blomberg’s dismissal, Hitler showed an unprecedented degree of trust in him, which at times seems to have bordered on genuine friendship; even after the general’s retirement, he continued to speak highly of him.Footnote ⁹⁵ This ensured that Blomberg enjoyed a truly privileged position among the most senior Wehrmacht officers of the early Third Reich. An often overlooked fact is his role in acquainting Hitler with the military past of the United States. Blomberg spoke excellent English,Footnote ⁹⁶ and he took a keen interest in the history of the American Civil War, which he felt was a subject unduly neglected at German military academies.Footnote ⁹⁷ While a Generalleutnant, he had carried out an extensive tour of various bases and training establishments of the US Army between 24 September and 3 December 1930.Footnote ⁹⁸ He was unimpressed by what he saw at West Point, where so far as he was able to tell the syllabus placed greater stress on spit and polish than on modern tactics.Footnote ⁹⁹ While he levelled similar criticism at the National Guard units organised at state level, he nonetheless judged them to be valuable as an institution, because of the pro-military attitude they fostered.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ He singled out for particular praise the work done at the War College and within the reserve units attached to learning institutions, like the Reserve Officer Training Corps embedded in 325 colleges all over the country.Footnote ¹⁰¹ If there was one factor still limiting US military effectiveness in Blomberg’s view, it was the fact that too many of its officers had to hone their skills in theoretical exercises rather than by being in command of men, an inevitable consequence of the ratio between officers and enlisted men then prevailing. Of course, only a standing army could change that, but as matters stood around the turn of the years 1930–1, such a sea change – advantageous though it would be to the country’s role in world affairs – appeared unlikely.Footnote ¹⁰² In more general terms, Blomberg admired the unique way in which American society had coalesced around the idea of technical progress and economic prosperity. Irrespective of differences in ethnic background and economic income, Americans were remarkably homogenous in their outlook on life and their concerns. More importantly, as Blomberg put it, ‘it is possible to conclude that such a people will lend itself to be led’.Footnote ¹⁰³

The general was prone to exaggerate the extent of his influence on Hitler. Even so, it is fair to assume that throughout his time as minister for the armed forces, he must on average have met Hitler on a near-weekly basis. The extent to which he used this opportunity to widen the Führer’s horizons with regard to US military affairs would probably be a matter for speculation were it not for a casual aside made by a US journalist in a 1942 publication. Frederick Oechsner was head of the United Press International’s Berlin office from 1932 to 1941 and in this capacity managed to interview Hitler on four occasions. On one of these he gained access (whether because he was left unsupervised or through the good offices of a sympathetic adjutant remains open to speculation) to the library of the new German chancellor. In the 1942 book This Is the Enemy he gives one of the better descriptions of its holdings, even allowing for a couple of polemical asides calculated to cast America’s enemy no. 1 in a poor light.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ He estimated the number of books on military history as nearing 7,000.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Though the majority of these dealt with the lives and campaigns of one of ‘the German and Prussian potentates’, other subjects were covered too. Of particular noteworthiness was the fact that ‘there is Theodore Roosevelt’s work on the Spanish–American War, also a book by General von Steuben, who drilled our troops during the American Revolution. Blomberg, when he was war minister, presented Hitler with 400 books, pamphlets and monographs on the United States armed forces and he has read many of these’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ He also added that Hitler had no hesitations in having books in a foreign language translated if they caught his interest.

Figure 1.1 Werner von Blomberg (far left) and the service chiefs reporting to Hitler (right). Blomberg’s assessment of American military potential tended to complement the opinion Adolf Hitler had already formed in his mind.

(ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

Another potential influence was Fritz Wiedemann, who had served together with Hitler on the staff of the regimental HQ of 16. Bavarian Reserve-Infanterieregiment throughout much of World War I. Back then, Wiedemann had been the regimental adjutant and as such one of Hitler’s superiors.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ By all accounts, they got on well, though a bit of mischief may also have played a part when Hitler offered Wiedemann a position as his adjutant in 1921. At the time, Wiedemann was fully engaged running a successful dairy factory and he politely declined. When his business ran into trouble in the early 1930s, however, he remembered the offer and asked his old runner for a job. After spending most of 1934 as the adjutant of Rudolf Heβ, he moved on to become Hitler’s Persönlicher Adjutant in January 1935. His role is of some relevance to this account because in November and December 1937 together with his wife he undertook a four-week long trip through the United States which saw him visit (among other places) New York, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In his 1964 memoirs, he alleged that on the subject of the United States, Hitler ‘was inclined to believe any nonsense which was put to him’; accordingly he was determined to collect evidence on his travels to enlighten the dictator on his return.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Seeing that this statement comes from a member of Hitler’s close entourage writing after the war, it would normally have to be taken with a fistful of salt. However, Wiedemann’s growing estrangement from the regime in general and his concern over the underestimation of US power in particular can be corroborated from independent sources of the time.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Knowing that Hitler took a serious interest in architecture, he gifted him thirty richly illustrated books on recent feats of the US building industry, like the Empire State Building and the Hoover Dam. The recipient of this generous gift appears to have taken an interest, but only to the extent that he instructed Speer to plan his next projects with the specific aim of topping these structures. Wiedemann was also able to report at length about his impressions, when Hitler gave him an afternoon to do so in early 1938.Footnote ¹¹¹ A few weeks later, however, the Führer refused to sign up to the 1939 World Exhibition in New York over a perceived slight, at which point Wiedemann seems to have given up on further attempts to get Hitler acquainted with the USA. A year later he was sacked over his increasingly obvious lack of enthusiasm for Hitler’s war course and posted as consul general to San Francisco.Footnote ¹¹²

Hans-Heinrich Dieckhoff was Germany’s ambassador in Washington from mid-May 1937 to late November 1938,Footnote ¹¹³ and as such oversaw bilateral relations between the two countries during the crucial period when they first reached crisis point. He was ideally suited to the task since he had already served with the embassy in Washington as a Botschaftsrat (counsellor) from November 1922 to December 1926. Back then, Dieckhoff had acquired a reputation for familiarising himself with the politics of the country and the forces underpinning it to a remarkable degree – a trait that would stand him in good stead on his return to the USA in 1937.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Even more remarkably, his cables from the 1920s had reflected a pro-Weimar attitude not commonly found among the elite reared under the old empire.Footnote ¹¹⁵ This manifested itself in scathing criticism of the political Right at home in Germany, in particular its agitation against the endeavour of the Auswärtiges Amt to get the USA to intervene as an ‘honest broker’ in its attempts to restructure Germany’s reparations payments. Dieckhoff saw the agitation as counterproductive, on one noteworthy occasion referring to the activities of the NSDAP as ‘that Hitler-rubbish’, which he deemed to be ‘more dangerous than commonly assumed’.Footnote ¹¹⁶

It is impossible to say whether Hitler at any point learned of this unflattering assessment. In any case, Dieckhoff was informed in March 1937 that he was to take over from his predecessor Hans Luther to retrieve a deteriorating situation. Taking up his post on 15 May, he was able to draw on the good will he and his wife had accumulated in the previous decade. Even journalists known to be highly critical of the new Germany were at first inclined to give the new envoy the benefit of the doubt.Footnote ¹¹⁷ For his part, Dieckhoff appears to have seen his main task as carrying out some provisional damage control in order to stop relations from worsening even further. In his eighteen months as German ambassador he bombarded his superiors with dire warnings about the USA’s potential and that the outbreak of a new European war would see America siding with Britain either straightaway or after a brief period of transition. Initiatives virtually guaranteed to enrage the Americans were those that appeared to indicate a spread of National Socialism by way of alliance (with Italy or Japan) or by spreading political sedition. As history showed, Dieckhoff was powerless to prevent the alliances, but scored a success of sorts when he managed to convince his government to cut most ties with the Amerikadeutscher Volksbund, a party of Nazi sympathisers made up of German-Americans attempting to square their American nationality with the ideology and trappings of National Socialism.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Beyond this, it is difficult to assess to what extent Dieckhoff was able to form Hitler’s view of the United States. We have anecdotal evidence that by May 1938 Hitler was getting sorely exasperated by the tone and content of Dieckhoff’s cables. In Hitler’s view, they did not reflect the manifest reluctance in US government circles to get involved in any kind of European conflict and were much too ‘pessimistic’ in tone.Footnote ¹¹⁹ This appears to be confirmed by an event that occurred a few months later. While spending his summer holidays in Germany, Dieckhoff repeatedly tried – and failed – to get an audience with Hitler; when an interview finally came about through the intercession of Wiedemann, he found himself dismissed after a conversation of five minutes.Footnote ¹²⁰ What little influence he may have had around that time dwindled fast after his recall to Germany following the events of the Reichskristallnacht of November 1938. Technically, he remained ambassador to the USA until December 1941. He seems to have been copied into most or even all of the communications between the embassy and Berlin.Footnote ¹²¹ He also intervened on occasions when he felt that the caretaker envoy, Hans Thomsen, and the military attaché, Friedrich von Boetticher, were diverging ever so slightly from the line he had set, especially as regards America’s political will to intervene in the war.Footnote ¹²² His opinion was still sought whenever German–American relations had reached yet another impasse or when a propaganda ploy had to be found to counter yet another pro-British move by the Roosevelt administration. Even so, it was inevitable that his influence would wane with every passing month.

It may have been with a view to counter this development that on 9 January 1941 he composed a memo for Ribbentrop that is remarkable for the insight it gives into the workings of the mind of a German ‘appeaser’ in early 1941.Footnote ¹²³ He stressed that he was setting out to disprove the theory that in view of the current US help for beleaguered Britain, a ‘proper’ state of war between Berlin and Washington was unlikely to constitute much of a change. He went into considerable detail to explain that this would give heart to the other enemies of the Axis, virtually rule out a separate peace with Britain and grant the US President sweeping war powers, which would allow him to multiply many times over his country’s already considerable military potential. In the face of such a menace, Germany, he went on, could not but ‘keep cool’ and refuse all challenges and provocations that might come its way. However, in the last paragraph he conceded that there was one conceivable American transgression that would make a German–American clash ‘inevitable’. Should the US government dismantle its neutrality legislation prohibiting the sailing of US merchantmen into British waters and cap this by escorting American convoys straight into British ports, ‘a completely new situation would be created’.Footnote ¹²⁴ It is quite possible that he decided to end his paper on this bellicose note because such a development seemed a very long way off and because a wholly uncompromising peace stance would have consigned his memo to Ribbentrop’s waste basket. On the other hand, it may also have reflected his innermost thinking. Either way, it gives us an interesting insight into what level of US involvement in the Anglo–German war was regarded unacceptable both by Kriegsmarine admirals and diplomats.

On 19 April 1933 Generalleutnant Friedrich von Boetticher took over as the first German military attaché in Washington since 1917.Footnote ¹²⁵ He proved to be an excellent choice, who established cordial working relations with the relatively small circle of senior US army officers who in those days worked for the US Army chief of staff in Washington DC’s Munitions Building. He was conscious of the fact that fourteen years after Versailles, he was likely to be regarded as a ‘Hun’ and worked hard to overcome prejudices among his hosts. He was aided in this by two strengths. For one thing, he had already established cordial relations with a small number of US army officers who travelled to Germany in the 1920s to research German assessments of the AEF’s war in 1917–18. In his capacity as head of the Reichswehr’s Heerestatistische Abteilung (Department for Army Statistics), it fell to Boetticher to assist them in this task and smooth over any frictions.Footnote ¹²⁶ In addition, he had a keen interest in and remarkable knowledge of the military history of the US Civil War which never ceased to impress American friends with whom he toured the sites of battlefields in nearby Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania. We do not know when Hitler got into the habit of having Boetticher’s reports presented to him in raw form; a statement recorded by his army adjutant in June 1939 strongly implies that by then he had been reading them for at least a few months.Footnote ¹²⁷

By that stage a bizarre decision Ribbentrop had taken in early January to boycott invitations to official occasions hosted by Americans put the attaché in a unique position. German army officers posted abroad as attachés continued to be subordinate to Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH),Footnote ¹²⁸ and not the Auswärtiges Amt. This allowed Boetticher unfettered access to his old sources and circle of acquaintances, which virtually turned him into a substitute ambassador. Dieckhoff’s successor Thomsen more or less resigned himself to this state of affairs and even willingly co-signed cables that covered both political and military affairs but were clearly authored only by Boetticher, since he kept referring to himself in the singular.

This quirk alone would have made it impossible to disguise from Hitler or any of his senior military advisers who was actually running things in Washington. Accordingly, it greatly exasperated both Ribbentrop and Ernst von Weizsäcker, the permanent secretary (Staatssekretär) at the Auswärtiges Amt, in Berlin. Finally, when in late May 1941 the coverage of an important Roosevelt speech was yet again hijacked by the general, Ribbentrop succeeded in enforcing a division of labour which ensured that Thomsen reported on key political events by himself.Footnote ¹²⁹ If this new arrangement caused any friction between Thomsen and Boetticher, it has not been recorded; it is perfectly possible that a change in the general’s personal circumstances in the months before Pearl Harbor encouraged his silent acquiescence in losing his de facto ambassadorship.Footnote ¹³⁰

Together with his assistant air attaché, Hauptmann Peter Riedel, who from July 1938 kept an eye on the growth of American air power, Boetticher filed reports which were by and large accurate within a certain time frame. What set the general apart from Dieckhoff was the tone of his cables. To the ambassador a clash with the USA was something to be avoided at almost any price; Boetticher, while not denying the human and industrial potential of the country, began to shift his focus to the myriad of problems that confronted the Americans after Roosevelt announced a massive mobilisation in May 1940. This was justified insofar as most historians would agree that throughout 1940–1 US strategy was crippled by a major mismatch between ends and means. This manifested itself most clearly in the struggle to turn funds – which were available – into an adequate number of shipyards, factories, barracks, tanks, planes and, most importantly, trained men – which were not available. Boetticher also stressed time and again that these problems would be multiplied many times over by the need to support Great Britain and the increasing likelihood of conflict not just with Germany, but Japan too. As a result of this, too many of his cables placed rather too much stress on problems that were likely to be remedied in the mid-term, with only a handful giving the US Army its full due as a potential enemy endowed with considerable human and material resources.Footnote ¹³¹ As for the big picture, it can safely be described as the general’s blind spot. Only once did he dwell at length on the stage when the US armed forces were likely to be able seize a limited strategic initiative and the possible consequences this might have for the Axis.Footnote ¹³² The simple fact that the United States by dint of its size and location on the globe was practically invulnerable to any strategic threat Germany might be capable of marshalling in the early 1940s was not once brought up. Taken together, these sins of omission and commission undoubtedly produced a rather skewed intelligence picture of a potential enemy caught in a phase of uniquely transient vulnerability.

On Dieckhoff’s departure from Washington in November 1938, forty-seven-year-old career diplomat Hans Thomsen took over as caretaker envoy. Any attempt to determine the actual impact he had in shaping Hitler’s view of the United States should really be impossible, in view of the way in which he allowed himself to be elbowed aside by the attaché in 1939–41. Although he was still co-signing the cables from Washington, their diction and the persistent use of the first person singular made it clear they had been authored by Boetticher. While this exasperated Ribbentrop, it did not apparently do so with Hitler, who was full of praise for Boetticher’s work in the American capital. It is thus a stroke of luck for the historian that by early June 1941 Ribbentrop temporarily enforced the new routine on the Washington embassy that finally forced Thomsen to write and sign his own cables.Footnote ¹³³ For the first time Hitler would be given the opportunity of passing comment on two different reporting styles. Failure to do so might imply that he no longer took the time to read a fair number of the reports himself, an understandable assumption in view of the time that running the Russian campaign would demand of him in the summer and autumn of 1941. Proof to the contrary is provided by an August entry in the Seekriegsleitung’s war diary: ‘The Führer has noted with approval that reports of the envoy in Washington have proved to be unerring in their assessment of US political affairs and the political intentions of the President.’Footnote ¹³⁴ The entry also recorded the intention to copy the Japanese foreign ministry into some of these reports to help it reach a realistic appraisal of America’s strengths and weaknesses. When compared to Boetticher’s communications, Thomsen’s, though almost never substantially different in content, tend to be briefer and less burdened by the liberal use of invectives (‘Jews’, ‘warmongers’, ‘busybodies’). Post-war allegations that Thomsen allowed himself to be turned by the Americans into an agent of influence who in early December 1941 spoon-fed Hitler tainted intelligence to encourage a declaration of war have yet to be corroborated by contemporary US sources. Since these telegrams covered the same ground as the reports that he, Boetticher and Dieckhoff had repeatedly submitted over the last year, this allegation cannot be taken at face value.Footnote ¹³⁵

In the spring of 1942, Hitler reminisced over lunch on the work done by the two men who had been his eyes and ears in Washington in 1939–41. He praised them both as observers who had never allowed themselves to be ‘bluffed’ and who had been unerring in their judgements. It is noteworthy that Thomsen’s contribution did not vanish behind the larger role played by Boetticher. Hitler stated that he intended to single Thomsen out for a particularly challenging position after the war.Footnote ¹³⁶

All the individuals listed so far had regular access to Hitler either from a distance (Dieckhoff, Boetticher, Thomsen), through frequent personal contact (Hanfstaengl, Blomberg) or both (Wiedemann) over a prolonged period of time. Other personalities with an informed opinion on the USA only had fleeting opportunities to catch a moment or two of the Führer’s time, with many such visits undoubtedly going by unrecorded.

One of the more famous journalists and travel writers of the Germany of the inter-war years was the Austrian-born Colin Ross (1885–1945). Even though he studied engineering and economics between 1905 and 1910, he took to journalism, becoming a war correspondent before World War I, a profession he stuck to once the war broke out. In the inter-war years he travelled widely to most continents of the world and wrote a number of bestselling books about his exploits, three of which had the United States as their subject.Footnote ¹³⁷ A witness statement from the main Nürnberg War Crimes Trial suggests that in October 1939 the Hitler Youth leader, Baldur von Schirach, came up with the idea of introducing him to Hitler in the hope that he would impress upon the Führer the hopelessness of ever challenging the USA. If this really was the idea behind the scheme, it produced ambivalent results.Footnote ¹³⁸ Hitler met Ross in the Reichskanzlei for one hour around noon on 12 March, 1940. The chemistry between the two appears to have been quite good, because Ross was asked to return in two days’ time to have lunch with Hitler. The contents of their talk were recorded by Walther Hewel, Ribbentrop’s liaison at Führer’s Headquarters.Footnote ¹³⁹ Some of what Ross said reflected the common wisdom of most contemporary observers, such as the predominant role played in US political affairs by a relatively small, near-aristocratic clique centred on the East Coast and mostly descended from seventeenth-century English and Dutch settlers. They tended to be willing to cooperate with Britain but were distrustful of Germany. Americans of German descent were highly regarded by their countrymen and well integrated, but also rather anxious to be seen as such.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ This accounted for the futility of trying to instrumentalise them in any capacity on behalf of the new Germany.

In other areas, the views Ross put forward bordered on the bizarre and beg the question whether he had been coached to present them in this fashion with a view to pleasing the Führer. He seriously suggested bringing about an entente with the USA by illustrating to the Americans – with the help of a map drawn by himself – the fact that existing British ‘spheres of influence’ constituted a greater threat to the US position in the Western Hemisphere than anything Germany might have in store. As far as the fate of European Jews was concerned, he proposed to increase the rate of forced Jewish migration to the USA, with a view to deliberately increasing anti-Semitism there. Once this had occurred, the Americans would gladly agree to a ‘constructive’ solution put forward by the German government, preferably in the form of an overseas territory set aside for the purpose of creating a Jewish state. The possibility of a US–German clash in the near future does not appear to have been the prevailing theme of the discussion. Only when the conversation turned to the sitting US President and his re-election prospects was this subject touched on in an almost offhand manner. According to Ross, Roosevelt had come to power in the same year as Hitler and with a similar agenda, but had so far met with only a modicum of success due to the level of domestic opposition to some of his New Deal–connected schemes. His hostility towards Hitler was thus mainly motivated ‘by jealousy’. Ross apparently would not be drawn on Roosevelt’s prospects in November but unhesitatingly predicted that in the case of his re-election, he would be in a position to take the country to war should he choose to do so (‘dass er dann das amerikanische Volk in den Krieg führen könne, wenn er es wolle’).Footnote ¹⁴¹

1.2.1 First Impressions (1904–1920)

The outcome of the Russo–Japanese War (1904–5) had a major impact on Western perceptions of the Nipponese empire, and it appears that young Adolf Hitler was no exception to the rule. In Mein Kampf,Footnote ¹⁴⁴ as well as in numerous private conversations during the war,Footnote ¹⁴⁵ he claimed that he had rooted for the Asian power right from the start. This reflected a divide between Austrian-German and Czech students in his class, the latter being left disconsolate when the news of the Russian defeat was confirmed. He had a certain penchant for the Imperial Japanese Navy, and some comments from the 1940s suggest that this was tied to the latter’s ‘birthday’ at the battle of Tsushima in 1905.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ In Mein Kampf he would even lambast Imperial Germany’s supposedly half-hearted shipbuilding polices by contrasting them with the Japanese approach, which had made the difference between victory and defeat in 1905.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Japan joining the Entente powers does not seem to have affected his feelings towards the country one way or another. In a speech he delivered on 26 May 1920 he implied that he was happy to let bygones be bygones by asserting that Japan had been forced into arraying itself on the enemy side by its agenda of checking European expansion in the Far East.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Thereafter, he did not return to the topic.

1.2.2 Reading Matter

The fact that Hitler ever bothered to read a more or less scholarly book on Japan would probably be lost to history were it not for Rudolf Heβ’s assiduous work as a court chronicler in Landsberg gaol. In a letter written in May 1924 to his fiancée, he mentioned in passing that Hitler was reading Professor Karl Haushofer’s ‘book on Japan’ (‘Er liest zur Zeit des Generals Japan-Buch’).Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Since by then the highly prolific Haushofer already had five monographs dealing with Japanese subjects to his name,Footnote ¹⁵⁰ identifying the title would pose a problem were it not for two clues. It stands to reason that a matter-of-fact, almost offhand reference to ‘das Japan-Buch’ implies a degree of familiarity, which the recipient of the letter would be able to pick up on. Only a few months before, Heβ had received a gift copy of Japan und die Japaner from his friend Haushofer and began reading it more or less immediately.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Heβ also refers to the special interest Hitler had shown in chapters discussing Japanese architecture. None of the monographs about Japan Haushofer had so far published included dedicated chapters to architecture, but Japan und die Japaner does discuss the subject over a total of five pages.Footnote ¹⁵²

Japan und die Japaner is a relatively short (160-page) introduction to Japanese affairs divided into chapters on geography, topography, climate, economy, society and history. Haushofer wrote it with the stated intent of giving German readers an insight unburdened by ‘the selfish agendas of foreign powers’.Footnote ¹⁵³ Haushofer’s love for tortuous and overlong sentences makes it a tiresome read. At the same time, an uninitiated reader would have been left more confused than enlightened by the extreme brevity with which he narrates some phases of Japanese history – hardly a topic many Germans of the time would have had an even passing acquaintance with. Assessing the impact this book may have had on Hitler is speculative at best, but a few salient points that would have been of greater interest to him than others can be suggested. The most important would have been the book’s mantra that Japan is a country without ‘living space’. This forced the government to permit the migration of up to 600,000 of its people per year, either to colonies or protectorates like Korea or farther afield to California and Hawaii.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ According to Haushofer, this migratory wave was unique insofar as the government made it its priority that expatriate subjects, irrespective of where they settled, retain a high degree of loyalty towards the Land of the Rising Sun.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Haushofer describes the Japanese people as a hardy race remarkably inured to suffering, whether their own or other people’s.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ He is full of praise throughout the book for the manner in which they have mastered the unprecedented challenge of engineering in two generations the transition from an early modern society to being an industrial power. According to him, the main reason this has been achieved with so little friction is that a country untouched by invasion or mass immigration for more than 2,000 years can boast supreme ‘racial homogeneity’, a theme he returns to time and again in the text.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ He describes the country as currently finding itself at a crossroads, with further expansion to the north (China and/or the USSR) or the south (Southeast Asia) by peaceful or other means as the two major options. The author is candid in stating his belief that Japan’s future lies to the north, but stops well short of making a prediction.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

1.2.3 Public and Private Statements, Mein Kampf and the Second Book

Hitler’s references to Japan before his chancellorship are not only few in number but also brief in nature, more often than not serving as a foil or contrast. Moreover, they offer little clue as to whether he saw in Japan a future rival or ally. On 2 December 1921 he referred to the country as the ‘one remaining independent state’ which ‘international Jewdom’ was attempting to strangulate.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ In the late summer of 1923, he impressed upon a visiting US journalist that the NSDAP’s attitude to Jews bore a resemblance to that shown by the Federal government to Japanese migrants reaching American shores. The Japanese, according to Hitler, ‘have ruined no state. They are not carriers of Bolshevism.’ Nonetheless, he continues, ‘We look upon the Jews as you look upon the Japanese.’Footnote ¹⁶⁰

There is some evidence that on Hitler’s release from Landsberg prison, Haushofer’s influence had left a mark on his thinking. In a conversation with Hanfstaengl which took place in December 1924, Hitler waxed lyrical about the ‘racial purity’ and ‘soldierly virtues’ of the Japanese people engaged in a struggle for living space, making them natural partners for Germany in a future alliance against Russia.Footnote ¹⁶¹ With the exception of a couple of very brief comments, however, there are few references of substance to Japan in Mein Kampf, first published the following year. The theme from the 1921 speech surfaced again in the second volume of Mein Kampf. There, he spoke of Japan as an obstacle to the spread of international Jewry across the globe. He took up this theme again in the preface he wrote to a programmatic pamphlet published by the party two months later; he basically rationalised Britain’s recent refusal to extend the alliance treaty with Japan by referring to the inevitable Jewish plotting. This was virtually a foregone conclusion, he said, because for racial reasons Jews were incapable of infiltrating Japanese society as they were allegedly doing with any number of European countries. Hence, ways had to be found to isolate Japan and leave her surrounded by a coalition of hostile powers.Footnote ¹⁶² By Hitler’s standards, this was an accolade, and together with some of the other statements discussed, it appears to suggest that the idea of Imperial Japan as his favourite coalition partner had formed in his mind by 1925–6 at the latest.

However, such a judgement needs to be qualified. Both in Mein Kampf and a public speech delivered in April 1928, Hitler stressed that the Japanese were not a people capable of ‘creating’ culture (his use of the term implied that he meant scientific progress rather than the arts), but only of adapting or using it.Footnote ¹⁶³ The fact that the Japan of the 1920s was still to a large extent dependent on imports of Western high-end technology would have made such a comment doubly hurtful to any Japanese observer of German politics. Around the same time, Hitler had started to bracket Japan with China and India as a group of nations that the West was well advised to exclude from access to technological secrets. While incapable of unassisted innovative thinking, these countries boasted unlimited reserves of cheap labour that could put them in a position to produce the same goods as the West, but at much cheaper retail prices.Footnote ¹⁶⁴

Following this rather contradictory pattern of praise and condescension, in a public speech in May 1928 he elevated the previously patronised Asian nation to the lofty status of ‘troublemaker’ being hounded by the Western (read: Jewish) media. Here, he was in all likelihood referring to criticism aroused by a recent deployment of Japanese troops to the Shandong peninsula which resulted in a serious clash with Chinese Kuomintang forces near the city of Jinan (3–10 May 1928).Footnote ¹⁶⁵ It needs to be kept in mind, however, that this was little more than a casual aside in a long-winded speech dealing with the alleged power of Jewish-controlled media rather than Far Eastern affairs.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ The fact that two references to Japan in two months did not mark a sea change in his perception of the Far Eastern empire can be gleaned from his Second Book, which he produced that summer. In a manuscript running to more than 200 pages and boasting an extensive chapter dealing with the long-term threat posed by the USA, Japan barely featured. Passing reference had been made in Mein Kampf to the re-emerging of US–Japanese irritations after the end of World War I,Footnote ¹⁶⁷ and given the Second Book’s clear focus on foreign policy, expanding on this theme would have seemed like a natural choice. The point has been made that any discussion of Japan was dropped from Mein Kampf in order to avoid irritating the British, whom Hitler was still trying to woo at the time.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ However, in light of the fact that the Second Book never even got as far as the pre-publishing stage, the omission of even a sidebar on Japan is striking, all the more so since US–Japanese relations had just suffered a major blow with the passing of openly anti-Asian immigration legislation in the USA in 1924.

Following the attention he briefly gave Japan in 1924, Hitler’s next reference to the empire was rather long in coming and highlights what can be described as plain lack of interest. In a November 1930 speech, he denigrated a proposal for a multilateral treaty of disarmament by pointing out the need to keep the USSR in check. The way he saw it, nothing short of a defence treaty encompassing all non-communist nations on the planet ‘including the USA and even Japan’ – an utterly fanciful notion clearly beyond the means of 1930s diplomacy – would be needed to make this viable. It turned the entire matter under discussion into a moot point.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Again, Hitler was using a reference to the Japanese Empire as a means to make a point barely connected to Far Eastern affairs.

The first step towards a fundamental reassessment of Japan’s potential as an ally appears to have come about as a result of the Japanese Army’s occupation of Manchuria (September 1931). This brought a diplomatic crisis in its train, culminating in Japan’s decision to quit the League of Nations in March 1933. Both Gregor Straβer in a December 1931 speech and Hitler himself in an interview with a Japanese daily the following month expressed their pleasure that somebody was finally challenging the existing balance of power as represented by the League of Nations.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ By themselves, these public statements may not have meant much, especially since Hitler’s statement to the Japanese journalists (‘the NSDAP’s posture towards Japan is exclusively defined by the degree of support which it can receive from Japan in its struggle for revision of the Versailles treaty’Footnote ¹⁷¹) fell somewhat short of a passionate endorsement of German–Japanese amity. However, a contemporary observer in the guise of German diplomat Erich Kordt would later – in 1950 – point to the immediate aftermath of the Manchurian Crisis as the point when Hitler first began to take notice of Japan in a serious way. The invasion and annexation of Manchuria attracted his attention, but what really sold him on Japan was the fact that the country’s government decided to cut the Gordian knot by walking out on the League. Only from that point on did Hitler, according to Kordt, begin to think of Japan as a ‘potential ally, especially against the Soviet Union’.Footnote ¹⁷²

1.2.4 Input from Individuals with Access to HitlerFootnote ¹⁷³

Professor Albrecht Haushofer has been a person of interest to historians of the Third Reich for some time. A career officer of the Bavarian Army, he had spent a year in Japan in 1909–10 and returned to Germany having formed a highly positive impression of Japanese society.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ He served in World War I, retiring as a Generalmajor in 1919, and went on to become an unsalaried lecturer at Munich University in the same year. In the 1920s, he managed to reach a considerable audience through his highly prolific output and a monthly radio feature – a first in the young history of German broadcasting.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ His chosen subject was Geopolitik, a field of research seeking to establish the extent to which geography and climate determined a country’s historical evolution and future policy options.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ This included thoughts on the concept of Lebensraum (living space) and the possible need to expand borders deemed to be detrimental to a nation’s natural evolution, though he remained vague about whether wars of conquest were a legitimate tool to achieve this.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ As far as the options open to German foreign policy were concerned, he advocated alliances or at least close cooperation with Japan and the USSR; the one country against which he consistently harboured feelings of hostility was the United States.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Haushofer was introduced to Hitler by his student Rudolf Heβ in July 1921. When Heβ found himself imprisoned in Landsberg gaol after the failed coup of 1923, Haushofer paid him at least eight extensive visits. On most (possibly all) of these visits he also met Hitler.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ He developed a habit of bringing the two men books and journals and discussing their contents during his next visit. Visits by a minor celebrity such as he was did not go unnoticed, attracting the attention both of the Allied leadership in the 1940s and of many historians afterwards. The latter felt justified in making the assumption that Haushofer’s thoughts on ‘living space’ must to some degree have influenced Hitler’s thinking on the subject;Footnote ¹⁸⁰ from there to inferring that Haushofer had a major role in the writing of Mein Kampf hardly required a leap of faith.Footnote ¹⁸¹

For the purposes of this study, the extent to which Haushofer moulded Hitler’s views on Japan is far more important. Again it is thanks to Hanfstaengl that we have a record of Hitler’s frame of mind on the subject post-Landsberg. On two separate occasions in his memoirs, Hanfstaengl bemoaned how Heβ and Haushofer were filling Hitler’s mind with all kinds of ‘nonsense’ regarding the alleged military potential of Japan; to the cosmopolitan Hanfstaengl such infatuation could not but lead to a gratuitous confrontation with the USA.Footnote ¹⁸² Hitler and Haushofer continued to meet at irregular intervals throughout the 1920s and 1930s, even though in the majority of cases the backdrop would be an event involving a number of other people, such as a dinner party or a wedding. Hitler and Ribbentrop put Haushofer’s reputation in Japan to good use when they employed him as a go-between during the process of gradual rapprochement with Tokyo in 1934–6.Footnote ¹⁸³ Whether Haushofer was able to reverse the process by influencing the regime is more difficult to assess, especially if one considers that his last meeting with Hitler took place in November 1938 and appears to have ended acrimoniously.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ His idea of a ‘continental bloc’ involving a German–Soviet–Japanese alliance appeared to take shape when Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact in August 1939; the Tripartite Pact of September 1940 seemed like the next logical step on this road. However, there is no record of the Führer having sought the professor’s advice in the months before, and by December 1940 he had become thoroughly disenchanted with the idea of continuing to cooperate with the USSR. Even if – against all the evidence – Haushofer at that stage still had the means of reaching out to Hitler and imparting advice, it does not seem like the latter was bothering to listen. Thus, the invasion of the Soviet empire by the Wehrmacht in June 1941 would appear like a natural parting of ways between Haushofer and the regime.

As it happened, this had already been presaged by a wholly unconnected event. On 10 May, the professor’s protégé Heβ departed for Scotland in the hope that he might be able to broker a peace deal; on learning of this, Hitler was beside himself with rage and blamed Haushofer and his son Albrecht for putting the Deputy Führer up to such a nonsensical scheme.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Although Haushofer retained all his honours and his position, he lost much of the ready access he had previously enjoyed to the high and mighty of the Third Reich.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ The idea that either Hitler or anybody close to him would have sought or heeded his advice on the subject of joining Japan in a war with the USA at some point over the next seven months can thus be safely discounted.

Generalmajor Eugen Ott was a Swabian army officer who, after a transition from the artillery arm to the prestigious general staff in 1917, was invited to join the Reichswehr of the Weimar Republic after the war – a privilege he shared with only 4,000 officers.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ After spending most of 1933 as an exchange officer with Japanese artillery units in Nagoya and Manchuria, he was sent back to the Far East as military attaché in Tokyo, a position he held from April 1934 to April 1938. Rather than leave Japan on completion of his tour of duty, he was promoted on the spot to fill the vacancy left by the ailing ambassador Herbert von Dirksen and went on to serve four and a half years as the senior representative of the Auswärtiges Amt in the Japanese capital.

Ott was burdened with some political baggage, since he had been a close collaborator of the then Oberst Kurt von Schleicher from 1923 to 1929. During his time as the Weimar Republic’s last head of government (December 1932–January 1933), Schleicher found himself at the centre of an initiative by various establishment players that could potentially have grown into a major check on Hitler’s rise to power.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ As a result, he and a number of his associates were on the death list that formed the script of the Night of the Long Knives on 30 June 1934. The existing documentary record does not indicate whether or not Ott’s name ever featured in this document, and he would in any case have been safely out of the henchmen’s reach by then. Nor is there any conclusive evidence that his name was tainted by association afterwards. Hitler spoke favourably of him once or twice before the war, while Göring for unknown reasons appears to have held a grudge of sorts against him.Footnote ¹⁸⁹

Figure 1.2 Ambassador Eugen Ott (centre): the constant shifts and turns of Tokyo politics left the ambassador as exasperated and confused as any other Western envoy.

(ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

The extent to which Ott’s reports from Tokyo during the critical phase of 1941 shaped Hitler’s assessment of Japan’s potential as a military ally is difficult to answer. As the year progressed, the tone of the ambassador’s cables grew increasingly weary whenever the subject of Japan’s willingness to align with the Axis came up – a clear reflection of the futility of trying to discern the direction of Japanese government politics. While the German leader’s satisfaction with the tone and content of the reports emanating from the Washington embassy is a matter of record, no such echoes have survived of Ott’s reporting. What is a fact is that when the Japanese in early November first approached the Tokyo embassy, with a view to convincing the Germans to join them in their imminent war against the USA, Ott’s credibility had just taken a serious blow with the arrest in Tokyo of the German journalist and GRU spy Richard Sorge.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Sorge was a gregarious and charismatic personality who had befriended Ott and some of the attachés from 1934 onwards.Footnote ¹⁹¹ On a number of occasions when surprises sprung by the erratic and unfathomable nature of Japanese politics had left the embassy staff dumbfounded Sorge, assisted by a Japanese asset close to government circles, had made predictions that turned out to be remarkably accurate.Footnote ¹⁹² In this manner, he managed to become a permanent fixture at the embassy and personal counsellor to Ott and his attachés in all but name. At the peak of his influence, he was repeatedly given access to sensitive documents and invited to join regular evaluation meetings looking into Japanese military affairs with Ott in the presiding chair;Footnote ¹⁹³ by 1940 he and the ambassador had adopted the habit of ushering in the day with a working breakfast.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ The revelation that a man who had had the run of the embassy for years had been a Soviet asset all along sent shockwaves through the German foreign ministry, Japanese attempts at keeping the matter under wraps notwithstanding. However, it does not seem that the combined weight of these events, along with Ott’s association with Schleicher, cowed him into following the party line to a greater degree than he would otherwise have done. The reports he sent in the last weeks of peace if anything indicate a certain willingness to remind Berlin that entering the US–Japanese conflict constituted a move that warranted substantial concessions from the Japanese, which had not been forthcoming.Footnote ¹⁹⁵