Hitler Locks Horns with FDR

Something is wrong when we review Hitler’s plans for international conquest. Wasn’t he aware that a powerful nation called the United States of America might not stand quietly by while his armed forces went on a worldwide rampage?

The man in the White House during the 1930s, when Hitler was building up his military might, certainly had the Nazi dictator’s number. For when it came to the subject of German intentions, Franklin D. Roosevelt was a complete realist.

In 1938, as British prime minister Neville Chamberlain was getting his appeasement policy into high gear, Roosevelt thought that the best possible result would be to postpone the outbreak of hostilities for a few months or years. In the long run, FDR felt sure, Hitler’s ambitions could only be thwarted by force.

Roosevelt wasn’t long in making his suspicions clear to Hitler. When anti-semitic riots broke out all over Germany in the late 1930s — and the Nazis began sending thousands of Jews to concentration camps — the president withdrew his ambassador from Berlin.

Hitler dismissed Roosevelt’s response as trivial, explaining that the president was probably part Jewish — and certainly surrounded by a Jewish clique that dictated US foreign policy. FDR’s wife Eleanor was dismissed as having a "completely Negroid appearance."

As for the American people, they were a race of mongrels that would eventually be dominated — perhaps even destroyed — by the pure Germanic type: "The inferiority and decadence of this allegedly New World," Hitler taunted, "is evident in its military inefficiency."

When FDR demanded in the spring of 1939 that the German dictator explain his policies openly, he replied before his puppet legislature, the Reichstag, with false humility: "Mr. Roosevelt! I fully understand that the vastness of your nation and the immense wealth of your country allow you to feel responsible for the history of the whole world and for the history of all nations. I, sir, am placed in a much more modest and smaller sphere."

In so many words did Hitler suggest that it was not Germany but the United States that flew the flag of imperialism.

But the launching of blitzkrieg against Poland in September of 1939 proved that the German dictator had never intended to remain within his "smaller sphere." Since FDR’s expectations of Hitler had proven accurate, the president pressed Congress to aid Great Britain, which he hoped to save from the kind of defeat that was France’s fate in the spring of 1940.

One of Roosevelt’s first bold steps — this one taken without seeking congressional approval — was to transfer 50 aging destroyers from the United States to Britain’s Royal Navy in exchange for the use of eight British bases stretching from Newfoundland to the northeast coast of Latin America.

FDR in the White House, 1940

The deal riled American isolationists, who feared that Roosevelt would use the struggle against fascism as an excuse to become the Hitler of America. Strange as it may seem today, FDR was thoroughly misperceived, feared, and hated by a high percentage of conservative Americans.

In September 1940, despite well-organized opposition, FDR persuaded Congress to pass the first peacetime conscription in US history. As a result, 800,000 young Americans were drafted into the armed forces — a move that caused the roaring debate over Roosevelt’s policies to explode again.

Meanwhile in Germany, the real menace was warming to his task. While FDR was eking out a majority vote for the draft, Hitler was looking at the possibility of occupying a number of Atlantic islands as a prelude to an eventual war with the United States.

In particular, Hitler hoped to take the islands known as the Azores from Portugal and use them as a launching pad for the long-range bombers that were on the drawing boards at Messerschmitt — advanced aircraft that would be able to attack New York and the other great cities of the eastern seaboard.

Hitler was tantalized by the prospect of possessing such an offensive capability. By March 1941, when the Third Reich was being pounded by Britain’s Bomber Command, he was telling his staff that "I only regret we still have no aircraft able to bomb American cities. I would love to teach the Jews of America what it’s like."

On one point FDR and Hitler agreed: both were certain that the US and Germany were destined to fight each other to decide the human future. "War with the United States," Hitler counseled his inner circle in the early spring of 1941, "will come sooner or later." Still, the dictator hoped to defeat Winston Churchill in Great Britain and Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union before locking horns with FDR, so he struggled to maintain a low profile in his relations with the United States.

Out in the Atlantic a situation had arisen that complicated Hitler’s attempts to keep America out of the war. His U-boat commanders cried out that US warships were playing fast and loose with the recognized laws of naval neutrality by informing the British about the location of German wolfpacks. Hitler nevertheless insisted that they avoid engaging the US fleet.

German U-Boat in the Atlantic, 1941

By and large, his restraining influence worked, but when the US destroyer Greer was fired upon by German submarine U-625 in September 1941, an outraged FDR was ready to escalate the conflict. His anger boiled over when the US destroyer Reuben James was torpedoed at the end of October and sank with the loss of all but 45 of its 160-man crew.

Identifying Hitler as a rogue who meant to "create a permanent world system based on force, terror, and murder," FDR ordered the navy to shoot at any German warship that dared to enter the waters of the western Atlantic.

On May 27, 1941, the continuing crisis caused FDR to unveil his central concerns with great openness. In a speech broadcast from the East Room of the White House and heard by an estimated 85 million people around the globe, the president stressed how much he distrusted Hitler’s intentions.

"What started as a European war has developed," said FDR, "into a world war for world domination."

Since the speech helped to mark Pan American Day, Roosevelt dealt with the Nazi threat to South America and emphasized that the US had begun to build up its forces to repel a fascist attack on the New World. The president explained how he viewed the Nazis' long-range aims: "They plan to treat the Latin American nations as they are now treating the Balkans [that is, subjecting them to full-scale attack and military occupation]. They plan then to strangle the United States and the Dominion of Canada."

America, declared the president, had entered a state of "unlimited national emergency." Henceforth it would look to its arms above all else.

To hear Hitler tell it, not Germany but the United States possessed the grand designs. "Ja, Herr Roosevelt — and his Jews!" he exclaimed to a reporter named Pierre Huss in the autumn of 1941. "He wants to run the world and rob us of a place in the sun. He says he wants to save England but he means he wants to be ruler and heir of the British Empire."

Four months before Pearl Harbor, Hitler blamed all of Germany’s troubles on FDR, and he encouraged his propagandists to spread the word that the long-range goal of the Americans was to fulfill Jewish plans to wipe out the German race. But the Nazis would not be beaten, and the Jews would fall prey to their own schemes.

Joseph Goebbels said he expected all of European Jewry to perish during the struggle for the planet. Those Jews who managed to escape Hitler’s grasp in Europe would only delay their day of doom.

European Jews in
Nazi Extermination Camp, 1943

"Their last refuge," Goebbels predicted, "will be North America, and there too they will one day, sooner or later, end up footing the bill."

Here was a direct German threat to invade and occupy the continental United States. Also contained in this false prophecy was the threat to set up extermination camps on American soil. If such places had ever been built, it would not only have been Jews whose bodies were fed to the flames.

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