Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (109 page)

“Here the Minister paused and looked pointedly at me,” Welles recounted. Ribbentrop seemed to be adding the United States to the list of agents provocateurs. Welles said nothing.

German patience had been pressed to the limit, Ribbentrop continued. “The Poles had undertaken every kind of cruel repression against the German minority in Poland.” The torture and the mutilation inflicted on the Germans were “unbelievable.” The foreign minister offered to provide Welles with photographic and documentary evidence. “Finally Germany, to protect Germans in Poland, and as means of self-defense against Polish mobilization, had been forced to take military action.” At which point, for no good reason, England and France had declared war on Germany. “Germany would not have declared war on England and France,” Ribbentrop asserted.

Looking to the future, the foreign minister described Germany’s goals. “Germany wished for nothing more in Europe than what the United States possessed through the Monroe Doctrine in the Western Hemisphere. As a great power she was entitled to the safeguarding of her vital interests.” Ribbentrop referred to his time in the United States and said he understood that Americans felt—“quite legitimately”—that the Monroe Doctrine was essential to American security. Accordingly they should understand why Germans felt similarly about their own sphere of interest.

Germany would defend its interests against those who had declared war against it. “Germany was strong and completely confident of victory. She had immense military superiority, and from her eastern and southern neighbors she could obtain the raw materials she required.” The German government and people were prepared for a long war, but they believed it would be a short one. The American undersecretary had come to learn of Germany’s peace terms. They were simple. The “will on the part of England to destroy Germany” must be “killed once and for all.” Unfortunately, there appeared to be no shortcut to that end. “I see no way in which that can be accomplished,” Ribbentrop concluded, “except through Germany victory.”

The diatribe left Welles exhausted and discouraged. “Ribbentrop has a completely closed mind,” the undersecretary wrote Roosevelt. “It struck me as also a very stupid mind…. He is clearly without background in international affairs, and he was guilty of a hundred inaccuracies in his presentation of German policy during recent years.” Welles mentally tried to wash himself of Ribbentrop’s venom as he left the meeting. “I have rarely seen a man I disliked more,” he told the president.

H
ITLER, BY COMPARISON,
was a sweetheart, at any rate in personal style and tone. Roosevelt valued Welles’s report on Ribbentrop as revealing the mindset of the Nazis generally, but the president really wanted to know about Hitler. Not since Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo had a single person held such power of life and death over Europe. If Hitler wanted a continent-wide war, that war would ensue. If he did not, it wouldn’t. Roosevelt needed to know what Hitler wanted, and Welles’s job was to find out.

The exterior of the building that housed the chancellor’s office looked like a factory. “My car drove into a rectangular court with very high blank walls,” Welles wrote Roosevelt. “At one end was a flight of broad steps leading into the Chancery. Monumental black nudes flanked the portico to which the steps led. The whole impression of the court was reminiscent of nothing other than a prison courtyard.” A company of soldiers gave the Nazi salute as Welles passed. The head of the chancery, Otto Meissner, greeted Welles cordially. The two waited as others entered the building. “We then formed a procession of some twenty couples headed by Meissner and myself, and with very slow and measured tread first traversed a tremendously long red marble hall, of which the walls and floor are both of marble; then up a flight of excessively slippery red marble steps into a gallery which, also of red marble, has windows on one side and tapestries on the other. The gallery is lined on the tapestry side by an interminable series of sofas, each with a table and four chairs in front of them.” Off the gallery was a series of drawing rooms; in one of these Welles waited the few minutes until Hitler was ready to receive him.

The chancellor invited Welles to sit beside him and nodded to the undersecretary to speak. Welles reiterated that he came with no proposals. But he went on—“in as eloquent terms as I could command”—that President Roosevelt yet hoped that there might be a basis for a “stable, just, and lasting peace.” If statesmanship failed, a “war of annihilation” would ensue. “From such a war as that, who would be the victors?…Not only would the belligerents be the losers, but also the neutrals, of which the United States was the most powerful. We as a people now realized fully that such a war must inevitably have the gravest repercussions upon almost every aspect of our national structure.”

Hitler answered “very quietly and moderately,” Welles related to Roosevelt. But the substance of his response was identical to that of Ribbentrop. He taxed Britain and France for trying to prevent Germany from achieving its rightful place among nations, for provoking the Poles to make unreasonable demands on Germany, and for declaring war on Germany without justification. He asserted that Germany needed resources from beyond its borders simply to survive. He reminded Welles that Germany had existed as an empire half a millennium before Columbus discovered the New World. The German people “had every right to demand that their historical position of a thousand years should be restored to them.”

Hitler warned against thinking that a change of government would alter Germany’s policies. “I am fully aware that the allied powers believe that a distinction can be made between National Socialism and the German people,” he told Welles, speaking simultaneously to Roosevelt.

There was never a greater mistake. The German people today are united as one man, and I have the support of every German. I can see no hope for the establishment of any lasting peace until the will of England and France to destroy Germany is itself destroyed. I fear that there is no way by which the will to destroy Germany can be itself destroyed, except through a German victory. I believe that German might is such as to ensure the triumph of Germany, but if not, we will all go down together.

Welles tried not to appear shaken by this apocalyptic statement. He replied that it was the belief of the American government that the nations of Europe could find grounds for a stable and lasting peace and that no nation, let alone all of them, would have to “go down.”

“Hitler looked at me,” Welles wrote Roosevelt, “and remained quiet for a moment or two. He then said, ‘I appreciate your sincerity and that of your Government, and I am grateful for your mission. I can assure you that Germany’s aim, whether it must come through war or otherwise, is a just peace.’ I replied by saying that I would remember the phrase the Chancellor had used.”

W
ELLES’S REPORTS WERE
as close as Roosevelt ever got to Hitler, and the experience was sobering. Whether the German dictator was a madman was difficult to say, but he certainly was determined. He would have his continental war—Roosevelt essentially abandoned what slim hopes he had entertained of preventing it—and Europe would be put on the rack again.

The agony started in earnest in the spring of 1940. The eerie quiet that had followed the conquest of Poland was abruptly broken in April when Hitler ordered his armies into Norway and Denmark. Next came a German invasion of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, followed in turn by the main event of the fighting season: an all-out assault on France.

“The scene has darkened swiftly,” Winston Churchill wrote Roosevelt on May 15. Churchill had just become prime minister, replacing Chamberlain, whose appeasement policy was being torn to shreds by the German panzer divisions. Churchill was by no means the favorite of the Conservative party regulars, but, like Theodore Roosevelt among America’s Republicans a generation earlier, he was too popular to be denied.

Churchill had prepared for the premiership by, among other tactics, cultivating Roosevelt. For months he had sent the president detailed accounts of the naval battles between the Royal Navy and the German fleet. Roosevelt responded as Churchill’s informants, knowing the American president’s passion for the sea, suggested he would. “Ever so many thanks for that tremendously interesting account of the extraordinarily well-fought action of your three cruisers,” Roosevelt wrote upon receiving one such report. “I wish much that I could talk things over with you in person—but I am grateful to you for keeping me in touch, as you do.”

Churchill intended that the personal connection deepen. “Although I have changed my office,” he wrote Roosevelt, “I am sure you would not wish me to discontinue our intimate, private correspondence.” With the Germans overrunning the Low Countries and thrusting into France, the prime minister described the Allies’ predicament and their hopes for American help.

The enemy have a marked preponderance in the air, and their new technique is making a deep impression upon the French. I think myself the battle on land has only just begun…. The small countries are simply smashed up, one by one, like matchwood…. We expect to be attacked here ourselves, both from the air and by parachute and airborne troops in the near future, and are getting ready for them. If necessary, we shall continue the war alone, and we are not afraid of that.

But I trust you realize, Mr. President, that the voice and force of the United States may count for nothing if they are withheld too long. You may have a completely subjugated, Nazified Europe established with astonishing swiftness, and the weight may be more than we can bear.

Churchill asked Roosevelt to modify the American position from neutrality to “nonbelligerency,” by which he meant the United States would become an ally in all but actual fighting. He pleaded for warships, in particular destroyers to counter the threat from German submarines. The destroyers might merely be loaned, as British shipyards were laying new keels rapidly. “This time next year we shall have plenty,” Churchill said. British supply lines could break in the meantime, though, without the additional sub-hunters. He asked for as many aircraft as the United States could spare, at least several hundred. These might also be loaned and might be repaid by planes already being constructed in American factories for the British air force. Similarly for antiaircraft weapons and ammunition—“of which again there will be plenty next year if we are alive to see it.” Other materials, raw and finished, were hardly less critical. Britain would pay in kind or cash for them, though not at once. “We shall go on paying dollars for as long as we can, but I should like to feel reasonably sure that when we can pay no more, you will give us the stuff all the same.”

Roosevelt responded cautiously. He was far too canny not to realize that Churchill had been wooing him; he intended for the wooing to persist. “I am sure it is unnecessary for me to say that I am most happy to continue our private correspondence,” he assured the prime minister. “I am, of course, giving every possible consideration to the suggestions made in your message.” But the measures Churchill recommended were beyond his legal authority as president. The destroyer loan was a case in point. “A step of that kind could not be taken except with the specific authorization of Congress, and I am not certain that it would be wise for that suggestion to be made to Congress at this moment.” Congress would object that America needed the destroyers itself. And Congress might well be right. Besides, accomplishing the transfer would take at least six or seven weeks, by which time the contest in the Atlantic presumably would have been decided. As for the planes Churchill wanted, these would have to come from the factories, not from America’s military inventory. And they would have to be paid for. Roosevelt’s silence on Churchill’s request for credit indicated that the money must appear up front. “The best of luck to you,” Roosevelt closed, in words that must have sounded ironic when Churchill read them.