Joe Louis by Randy Roberts

Author:Randy Roberts [Roberts, Randy]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2010-10-25T16:00:00+00:00

By 1938 the careers of Louis and Schmeling and the courses of the United States and Nazi Germany were moving along parallel tracks. For much of the mid-1930s the shapers of U.S. foreign policy, as well as large portions of the American people, had tragically misjudged Adolf Hitler. Certainly it took William E. Dodd, the American ambassador in Germany from 1933 to 1938, a few years to gauge the direction that Hitler was moving. Dodd’s intellectual odyssey in Nazi Germany throws light on American attitudes toward Hitler’s regime. The dapper, professorial Dodd, a southerner and a die-hard Jeffersonian who had taken his Ph.D. in history at the University of Leipzig, viewed his appointment as an opportunity to infuse American foreign policy with a dose of Wilsonian internationalism. He traveled to his new assignment believing Germans to be “by nature more democratic than any other great race in Europe,” and he considered that they had been unjustly punished at the Versailles Peace Conference.16 Though he personally opposed Nazi rearmament and blatant anti-Semitism, he insisted that “a people had a right to govern itself and that other peoples must exercise patience even when crudities and injustices are done.” Give the Nazis a “chance to try their schemes,” he counseled President Roosevelt.17

The Blood Purge on the night of June 30–July 1, 1934, changed Dodd’s—though not yet other Americans’—thinking about Hitler’s plans. The murder of Ernst Röhm, other storm troop leaders, and several high-ranking bureaucrats during the Night of the Long Knives exposed Hitler’s willingness to use lies, torture, and murder to achieve total power. After the purge of both right-and left-wing leaders, Dodd wrote of Hitler in his diary, “I have a sense of horror when I look at the man.”18

During the next few years millions of Americans began to share Dodd’s sense of horror. Hitler and the Nazis could not be trusted, Dodd warned, convinced that Germany’s goal was “unlimited territorial expansion.”19 Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland, Axis Pact with Italian fascist Benito Mussolini, military support for fascist Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and Anschluss with Austria showed that the movement toward war was picking up speed. As Winston Churchill remarked during the Anschluss debate, “Europe is confronted with a program of aggression, nicely calculated and timed, unfolding stage by stage, and there is only one choice—either submit, like Austria, or take effective measures while time remains.” During the same years, the movement toward the “final solution” of the “Jewish question” was also gaining momentum in Nazi Germany. From the initial Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses and the removal of Jews from the civil service; to the formation of concentration camps and the expulsion of “non-Aryans” from positions in banks, the stock market, the law, journalism, and medicine; to the Nuremberg Blood Laws and the seizure of Jewish businesses and homes—Jews under Nazi rule were systematically removed from virtually all aspects of German economic, social, and cultural life.

The reality of the “new Germany” spread slowly across America. To be sure,

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