Clayton native served as ambassador to Germany in 1930s

By Benjamin Sanderford

William Edward Dodd left for Germany as U.S. Ambassador on July 7, 1933. He had been there before from 1897 to 1899 as a student at the University of Leipzig, a major break for the Clayton farm boy.

Since then, Dodd had enjoyed an impressive academic career and became active in the Democratic Party. It was this association that prompted him to seek a position in the new administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Unfortunately, the Germany that Dodd returned to was not the land of intellectual excellence that he remembered, but a deeply troubled country.

The new chancellor, Adolf Hitler, had just completed the process of outlawing every political organization other than his own Nazi Party, and he was already showing an obsession with persecuting Jews.

Many officials at the State Department were unconcerned by Hitler’s anti-Semitism, and Dodd himself thought, like many people at the time, that Jews had been too powerful in pre–Nazi Germany.

Nevertheless, after explaining to Hitler that it would be better to avoid causing “great offense” while dealing with Jews, Dodd was taken aback when the German ruler snapped that “if they continue their activity we shall make a complete end of them in this country.”

The ambassador had been warned. By this time, March 1934, Dodd was in despair over the Nazi regime’s depravity. Months earlier, he confessed that he had “hoped to find some decent people around Hitler” who could restrain their leader’s worst impulses. Now he realized that “the whole gang” was “a horde of criminals and cowards.”

The murder of Hitler’s remaining political rivals, including his predecessor as chancellor, on the Night of the Long Knives (June 30 – July 2, 1934) confirmed to Dodd the inherent criminality of the Nazis.

He thereafter threw himself into analyzing who might feel Hitler’s wrath next. In May 1935, after studying Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf, Dodd accurately predicted that Germany would invade Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. That September, he foresaw that Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator who had inspired Hitler, would side with the Nazis against Britain and France.

President Roosevelt valued Dodd’s insight (“I need him in Berlin,” he said), but many other policymakers did not. Some in the State Department looked down on Dodd because he was not a professional diplomat, and they were not nearly as worried about Nazi crimes.

Similarly, isolationist members of Congress considered him too anti–Nazi. By the summer of 1937, the increasingly embattled Dodd’s superiors were pressuring him to attend the Nazi Party’s annual rally at Nuremberg for the first time.

The ambassador was not a total stranger to appeasement, he had not supported the journalist Edgar Ansel Mowrer’s attempt to cover the 1933 rally because he found Mowrer too provocative, but he saw no point in legitimizing Hitler’s dictatorship with his presence. I

n the end, Dodd managed to visit the United States at the same time as the rally, but another representative was sent in his stead, leading Hitler to gloat about finally having official U.S. recognition.

Dodd had had enough. He wrote his resignation letter intending to step down in March, but Hitler, with a bully’s instinct for weakness, pressured the State Department into getting rid of Dodd that December.

William Dodd died on February 9, 1940 convinced that he had failed to persuade Nazi Germany to moderate its behavior. In truth, he was overly hard on himself.

The information he provided was key in convincing Roosevelt that the “Third Reich” had to be stopped, and no diplomat could have lifted the red mist that clouded Hitler’s vision. “Long live war,” the German tyrant toasted on September 2, 1938, “even if it lasts from two to eight years!” H

itler would start his war one year later, and he would declare war on the United States two years after that. It would then be time for Dodd’s fellow Johnstonians to take up the challenge.

Benjamin Sanderford, a resident of Clayton, studied social science at UNC Greensboro. He can be reached at benwsanderford@gmail.com.