Why We Watched: Europe, America, and the Holocaust by Theodore S. Hamerow

Author:Theodore S. Hamerow [Hamerow, Theodore S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Holocaust
ISBN: 9780393069686
Google: yycwNruPFbcC
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2008-08-17T06:19:41.270384+00:00

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Scylla, Charybdis, and Washington, D.C.

WHAT FINALLY LED to the United States’ abandonment of strict neutrality was not the Nazi regime’s growing suppression of political dissent or the intensification of its anti-Semitic program. The chief reason was the unexpected change in the configuration of the diplomacy of Europe. In the first few years, the Hitler government had devoted its foreign policy to removing the military restrictions imposed on Germany at Versailles. That goal had been achieved without great difficulty. Amid the economic hardships and social tensions of the Great Depression, it did not seem to matter much that the Third Reich had reintroduced general conscription or sent its troops into the Rhineland in violation of the peace treaty. But more troubling was the conclusion in the fall of 1936 of an informal alliance between the two leading revisionist states, the Rome-Berlin Axis, committed to a complete rejection of the postwar settlement. A duality of power now replaced the hegemony of the West European democracies, particularly France, as two camps divided by ideological differences and territorial disputes began to threaten each other with the danger of a military conflict. On both sides of the Atlantic, complacency over the stability of the international order gradually gave way to a growing concern.

It was Hitler’s strategy of territorial expansion through the exploitation of the fear of war that finally led the American government to abandon its policy of noninvolvement in European affairs. In the course of a single year, from March 1938 to March 1939, the Third Reich succeeded in incorporating Austria, annexing the Sudeten region, and destroying Czechoslovakia, all without a single military casualty. The balance of power on the continent was clearly shifting from France and England to Germany and Italy, especially Germany. To make matters worse, a momentous change was also taking place on the other side of the globe. In July 1937, Japan embarked on an undeclared war against China, which threatened to alter the balance of power in the Far East. The Great Depression, by undermining the economic foundation of the status quo, had opened the way for a powerful movement to alter the existing structure of international relations. For the United States, this meant that the favorable diplomatic environment in which it had achieved the rank of one of the great powers was now being threatened. The American government had reached a modus vivendi, an informal but comfortable understanding with the leading democracies of Western Europe. Could it feel equally secure in a world dominated by authoritarian, ambitious, and aggressive newcomers on the international scene?

This concern led the United States to take the first hesitant steps away from the policy of nonintervention. Ideological opposition to totalitarian oppression and moral rejection of ethnic bigotry played only a minor role. The big question was, what would be the situation of the United States in a world dominated by revisionist states like Germany, Italy, and Japan? Wouldn’t the nation be isolated and perpetually on the defensive? And wasn’t there also the danger

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