And never was.
Newly unveiled memos from Adolf Hitler’s chancellery and Foreign Ministry portray a cozy pre-World War II relationship between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the German madman.
Several going up for auction Aug. 24-27 at Alexander Historical Auctions show that FDR pressured Hitler’s aides to have the fuhrer grant a meeting with three pals, top officials from Standard Oil and Texaco, around the time of the 1936 Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg.
In one, an aide wrote to Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop that “in view of Roosevelt’s personal interest … I recommend very strongly that his request should be granted.”
Hitler eventually blew them off, but the memos show the president’s efforts to help his personal friends in their businesses, something that today would be impeachable at the least.
Richard Nixon got a raw deal.
At the time, William Dodd, the US Ambassador to Germany who, having been in place since the summer of 1933 and who personally knew many of the victims of the “night of the long knives”, refused to attend any of the rallies “glorifying Hitler”. For this and his prescient warnings he was considered a mismatch by the Roosevelt State department. He was almost alone in his dire warnings of what lay ahead. After deep state undermining and leaking of documents, he was eventually recalled in 1937 and replaced with a more pro Nazi appeaser more along the lines of Joe Kennedy. Roosevelt was more afraid of the isolationist majority seeing him as a war monger than the notion of rallying support to reign in Hitler’s ambitions when it might have been possible.
JC – Did you read, ‘In TheGarden of the Beasts,’ by Erik Larson?
I didn’t feel quite so sanguine about William Dodd – was I being unfair?
I just finished that book. He struck me as a distracted but cerebral and humble Ambassador who was unlike the entitled class more typical of the State department lifers. He attempted to be objective through his first year but obviously disgusted by the anti-Semitic build-up despite his own bigotry which was common during that era. After the night of the long knives he shed whatever ambiguities he went in with. He was actually a sad story but at least heroic in standing up to the international progressive self-imposed blindness to the Nazis.
I think we actually agree, thanks for reply.
Why wouldn’t relations be normal with Germany in 1936?
Indeed.
Perhaps that’s why “history” pushes the narrative that Eleanor Roosevelt was the REAL President …
What About The PC Party and the Liberals both of which, right at the critical moment when the CCP was collapsing because the Chinese people were starving.
sold Millions of Bushel’s of wheat, and wrote the sales off against the Taxpayers.
I don’t think any of it was ever repaid.
The CCP and Canada’s politicians said China had suffered unfortunate natural disasters.
The CCP was starving them to death.
http://www.kwcg.ca/bbs/home.php?mod=space&uid=61910&do=blog&id=3915
The Americans knew about that. They found out through their U-2 flights over Lop Nor, the Chinese nuclear test range around the time they detonated their first weapon. The Americans couldn’t say anything publicly about it because those U-2 missions were illegal as they violated Chinese airspace.
Anyone who has a lick of sense knows that there was a lot of US capital invested in the Third Reich. Follow the money, how did a corporal in the Germany Army in 1918 organize and outfit a private army in less than ten years. Which bank in America/Germany funded Hitler’s SA during the Twenties. Britches, boots and shirts didn’t grow on trees in Germany in the Twenties or the Thirties so where did Hitler get the where-with-all to finance his rise to power in a country that couldn’t muster the reparations called for in the Treaty of Versailles? Just asking for a friend.
Quite so. Banking was only the beginning of it. Opel was the wholly owned property of General Motors. Opel was also the principal manufacturer of military trucks for the Wehrmacht during the war. Via Sweden, it was receiving US produced truck parts for its trucks as late as 1944. There was more that a little surprise by some army maintenance soldiers among the Allies that captured German trucks had American parts in them.
But then the frontline soldiers in Europe had lots of unpleasant surprises waiting for them. Even though Allied governments had known the truth long in advance, they still concealed the existence of the extermination camps in Germany and eastern Europe from their soldiers and the public. They were discovered by direct reconnaissance by the soldiers themselves.
Note the only person at the time who thought he was a madman, was Churchill, and no one believed him, or listened to him.
and had Germany not attacked the USSR in 1941, he probably would have still been getting good press in the NYtimes
That would never happen. Hitler and the rest of the National Socialists were very clear that war with the other gang of socialists, the Communists, was always the intention. Demolition of Poland and the USSR was the only way to compensate for the insane demands of the economic policy of Autarky.
“but the memos show the president’s efforts to help his personal friends in their businesses, something that today would be impeachable at the least.”
No, what would have been impeachable would have been if Eisenhower had called Roosevelt out about it.
Impeachable?
Meet the Bidens.