740.00/117½

The Ambassador in Germany ( Dodd ) to President Roosevelt 1

Dear Mr. President: Before you receive this, you will have seen a telegram or two which we shall have sent. This letter is designed to explain things a little further in case you have time to read anything.

Hitler is in a difficult position. His people are afraid of war, but not so much as the English and French. He is trying curious means to unite everybody. Universities and schools are all reorganized with no opponents allowed anywhere, hundreds of professors dismissed or pensioned when too eminent. The Protestants and Catholics must all allow their children from their sixth year to be taken in hand by Party propagandists. Some preachers resist and are imprisoned; others, who are very eminent, continue opposition, but their supporters are declining in numbers. Several eminent Party leaders go about the country proclaiming the Fuehrer as a modern Jesus, reorganizing all churches on “true German” principles. Mussolini is of course the modern Julius Caesar, annexing Spain.

Just how real is the alliance between “Jesus” and “Caesar” one cannot say, the purposes of both conflicting. Certainly there are some doubts. Although many eminent Germans hope and pray for a royalist restoration, about all Germans think annexation or absolute control of the Balkan states is their right. Hitler curiously promises Holland, Belgium and Switzerland complete independence, yet authorizes maps in universities, and for sale everywhere, which show these countries as parts of Germany. At the same time the propaganda in these little countries, as also in Norway, Sweden, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Rumania, secret and public, contradicts the idea of real independence of any country where there are any considerable numbers of people of German descent. Millions of dollars are [Page 639] spent each year in this direction, and Boehle, chief of Foreign Propaganda organization, is now the most important official in the Foreign Office after von Neurath.2 There are secret agents of Boehle in all the German diplomatic offices. What this means one can readily see.

Dr. Schacht3 said to me a few days ago at a table where high Nazi officials sat: “Mussolini is annexing Spain and later annexing Egypt—he is our Julius Caesar.” I raised some questions as to the dangers. He insisted that he was right. I raised the point a few days later when von Neurath was in Vienna, and the opinion there was not quite in agreement. However, the Foreign Office has several times asserted that Germany would not protest against Italian annexation of Egypt. On this occasion the Foreign Office again asserted Germany’s right to control the “Danube” zone, and hoped von Neurath could unite Austria, Hungary, Germany and Italy—a slight fear that Mussolini might not keep his promises to Germany, he being a masterful Machiavelli. When I talked about better commercial relations with the United States, the Staatssekretär said he favored proper trade and treaty arrangements. I asked why we had received no reply to the State Department’s invitation to send delegates to the proposed April conference in Washington.4 The reply was that the Economics and Labor ministries objected—i. e., Nazi officials.

When one, therefore, wonders about the possibility of a real peace conference in Washington or elsewhere, the answer is: Will Germany or Italy confer seriously with any other peoples when their major aims are to dominate Europe and do it by frightening the populations of democratic countries? Several times since I have been here the peoples of England and France, especially those of smaller nations, have been frightened so that they yielded, events in Ethiopia and Spain being best examples. At the same time, great business companies of all democratic countries have supported the German-Italian demands by increasing sales of arms and war supplies, ours quite as much as others. Even small countries, like Rumania, have risked their own fates by selling war materials.

So, how can a peace conference succeed? Only through a real economic-finance cooperation between England, France and the United States. Can this be done? You know how much opposition English and French businessmen made to the Buenos Aires proposals5[Page 640]almost as much as Italy and Germany made through secret propaganda before and while you were in Latin America. In case Spain is actually annexed by Mussolini and then Germany proceeds to make moves into the eastern zone (same as the 1900–1914 policy of army officials here), England and France might be frightened enough to join the United States in real peace agreements. But one can never know what the DuPonts and the steel people cooperating in Europe with I. G. Farben and other corporations would do under cover, as they did more than once at Geneva peace conferences.

You are in the most important position in the world, with amazing economic duties at home. Yet real success at home can not be attained if a world war breaks or if the mainland of Europe becomes a solid dictatorship. You know the possibilities. I have simply tried to appraise things on this side of the Atlantic. I shall once more talk with high officials here, as indicated above, about Germany participating in a peace conference, and wire you the answers I get. All the really informed internationalists hope and pray for your success.

Sincerely yours,

William E. Dodd

P. S. Have been told more than once that all this is reported to the Government here before or soon after it reaches you. WED

  1. Photostatic copy obtained from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N. Y.
  2. Constantin von Neurath, German Minister for Foreign Affairs.
  3. Hjalmar Schacht, German Minister of Economic Affairs, and President of the Reichsbank.
  4. Tripartite technical conference on the textile industry held in Washington, April 2–17, 1937; see pp. 975 ff.
  5. Presumably final act of the Buenos Aires Peace Conference entitled “Organization of an Inter-American Institute of Economics and Finance”; see Report of the Delegation of the United States of America to the Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Peace, Buenos Aires, Argentina, December 1–23, 1936 (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1937), p. 239; see also Foreign Relations, 1936, vol. v, pp. 3 ff.