A book about Hitler and America? The brief title calls for an explanation. Half a dozen books have been written about Hitler and the United States, most of them dealing with German-American foreign policy between 1933 (the year Hitler came to power) and 1941 (the year he declared war on the United States). Diplomatic relations between Germany and the United States between 1933 and 1941 should, of course, play an important role in any discussion of Hitler and America, but not at the expense of exploring the origins and development of Hitler’s views. Many things in America during the 1930s...

In February 1942, barely two months after he had declared war on the United States, Adolf Hitler praised America’s great industrial achievements, admitting that Germany would need some time to catch up. The Americans, he said, had shown the way in developing the most efficient methods of industrial production.¹ This was particularly true in the iron and coal industries, which formed the basis of modern industrial civilization. He also touted America’s superiority in the field of transportation, especially in the automobile industry. Hitler loved automobiles and saw in Henry Ford a great hero of the industrial age. His personal train...

Looking back on the first five years of the Nazi regime, Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, gave a direct and blunt answer to the often asked question, “Why did the Western powers let Hitler do what he wanted for so long?” On April 5, 1940, he told representatives of the German press,

Up to now we have succeeded in leaving the enemy in the dark concerning Germany’s real goals, just as before 1932 our domestic foes never saw where we were going or that our oath of legalism was just a trick. We wanted to come to power legally, but...

At the height of the Austrian crisis, on March 8, 1938, a famous American visitor came to call on Adolf Hitler at the Reich chancellery—the former president of the United States, Herbert Hoover, who had been chauffeured from Prague to Berlin in a private automobile. Hoover, by profession an engineer, was very impressed by what he saw on his way to Berlin: splendid new highways, new housing developments, and prosperous towns and villages.¹ In his hour-long conversation with Hitler, Hoover praised Germany’s economic prosperity and the prevailing mood of hopefulness throughout the nation. Although Hitler did most of the...

Adolf Hitler opened the year 1939 with a promise and a threat aimed at the Western democracies and the Jews who supposedly dominated them. On January 30, in a speech to the Reichstag, Hitler complained about self-righteous democratic leaders who stuck their noses into the affairs of sovereign nations and tried to impose their form of government on them. He referred specifically to Churchill, Eden, Cooper, and Ickes, calling them “apostles of war” (Kriegsapostel).¹ He pointed to an orchestrated, worldwide attack on the Third Reich, claiming that it was inspired by Jewish leaders. These Jewish opponents of the Third Reich...

In his annual message to Congress on January 6, 1941, President Roosevelt once more stressed the necessity of supplying the victims of aggression with all the materials and weapons they needed to fight predatory nations. Looking to the future, he hoped that the world would be governed by four vital freedoms: freedom of speech and expression, freedom to worship God, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Hitler’s New Year message to the German people had quite a different tone from Roosevelt’s. It was a recapitulation of German military triumphs and a prediction of future ones to come. He warned...

In mid-January 1942 the German navy launched a surprise operation, code-named Paukenschlag (Drumbeat), on American shipping off U.S. coastal waters, extending from Maine to the Gulf of Mexico. In the years prior to 1942, Hitler’s naval chiefs had been straining at the bit to retaliate against American warships, which had shadowed German vessels and reported their location to the British. As mentioned earlier, there had been frequent clashes between German U-boats and American “neutrality patrols,” but Hitler had given strict orders to the German navy again on June 21, 1941 (one day before the invasion of Russia), to refrain from...

In the spring and summer of 1943, Allied intelligence services picked up rumors, many of them surfacing in the capitals of neutral countries such as Turkey, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, and Sweden, that the Germans were conducting secret negotiations with the Russians to end the war in Eastern Europe. This sent shock waves through the diplomatic ranks of the Anglo-American camp. Roosevelt and Churchill were gravely concerned about the possibility of a Nazi-Soviet rapprochement. Stalin’s demands increased in proportion to his battlefield successes, raising dark suspicions among anti-Communists in the Western alliance that the Soviet dictator, like his counterpart in Berlin,...

In his January 1, 1944, New Year’s address to the German people, Hitler claimed that Germany had successfully weathered the severe setbacks of the preceding year. He mentioned the Allied landings in North Africa, the fall of Mussolini, and the devastating bombing attacks on major German cities such as Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, and Kassel. He promised to win the war and rebuild Germany’s battered cities, to make them more beautiful than they had been before.¹ The hour of revenge would come. The German leadership, he said, was prepared to prosecute the war to its ultimate conclusion and with the “utmost...

During the second week of September 1944, an American task force, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel William B. Lovelady, conquered the first German town, Roetgen, ten miles southeast of Aachen. The soldiers of Combat Command B of the Third Infantry Division did not expect the welcome they got in this small town. All the houses in Roetgen had white sheets hanging from their windows, a sign that the people wanted to surrender. American soldiers were greeted by German civilians who brought them hot coffee and flowers. The Germans told the American GIs that 90 percent of the population was eagerly awaiting...

In Mein Kampf Hitler had said that either Germany would be a world power or there would be no Germany. When he wrote this line in 1925 there were only two major world powers, Britain and the United States, and the latter was in relative isolation. The Soviets had only just consolidated their grip on the Russian people after several terrible years of civil war. They were in no position to extend their power and influence in Europe. During Hitler’s years in the political wilderness, between 1924 and 1929, he paid little interest to foreign affairs other than to denounce...