A Sense of the Enemy: The High Stakes History of Reading Your Rival's Mind (17 page)

If Ribbentrop proved a brick wall, Welles gleaned even less from Rudolph Hess, Hitler’s deputy in the Nazi Party—a man whom Welles found exceedingly stupid. Hess never deviated from his script and gave the impression of an automaton. Four other meetings did, however, reveal at least a hint of Hitler’s thinking and internal government dynamics. Ernst von Weizsacker, Welles’s counterpart in the German Foreign Ministry and a traditional Weimar-era diplomat, revealed much when he explained that he had been strictly instructed not to discuss any subject relating to peace. That admission underscored the remoteness of establishing any last-ditch settlement. Then Weizsacker pulled his chair toward the center of the room and wordlessly indicated that Welles should do the same. The Nazi security service was listening, always, and every official had to operate under the weighty pall of surveillance. Welles asked if he thought that Mussolini might persuade the Führer to negotiate a settlement. Weizsacker felt that Ribbentrop would try to block any such attempt. As they parted, Weizsacker became teary-eyed, telling Welles that he hoped there might be a way that “an absolute holocaust could be avoided.”
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At 11:00 on the following morning, officials arrived at Welles’s hotel to escort him to the Chancellery. The Führer would grant him an audience. Inside the great marble hall, tapestries and sofas lined the corridors. Welles was ushered into a waiting room until Hitler was ready to see him. The Chancellor greeted Welles formally but pleasantly. Hitler looked fit, and taller than Welles had imagined. Throughout almost the whole of their meeting Hitler spoke eloquently in a calm and dignified demeanor. Though Welles could not have known it, that same day Hitler had issued orders to the Wehrmacht to prepare for an invasion of Denmark and Norway.
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Welles explained that he came as the representative of the President of the United States and that he would report only to the President and Secretary of State. He had no specific proposals, but he hoped to determine whether stability on the continent remained possible. “Was it not worth every effort to seek the way of peace,” Welles asked Hitler, “before the war of devastation commenced and before the doors to peace were closed?” Such a peace, Welles explained, must include a contented and secure German people but also an international community that did not view Germany as a threat. Asked if the Chancellor could affirm that a possibility for peace still existed, Hitler quietly detailed his foreign policy over the previous seven years, exactly as Ribbentrop had done the day before. Welles had the distinct impression that every Nazi official he met with had been instructed to stick to the identical script.

Welles attempted to engage Hitler in a discussion of Germany’s long-term economic interests, arguing that no country could benefit more than Germany from the resumption of liberal trade relations. Hitler said that the nations of central and southeastern Europe needed to purchase German industrial products (of the kind that those countries could not themselves produce), while Germany could import those nations’ raw materials. Trade with the United States was not his priority. Welles countered that German luxury goods would not find markets in central and southeastern Europe, as those populations could not afford them. Only advanced economies such as the United States could provide sufficient consumers. War would disrupt Germany’s best hopes of economic growth. Welles was trying to reason with the Führer by assuming that economic interests were one of his primary concerns. Either he did not grasp Hitler’s underlying drivers, or he simply wanted
to draw the Chancellor out in hope that he would reveal what he truly wanted. In part, Hitler did reveal himself.

Hitler replied that he had three aims: historical, political, and economic, in that order. Germany had once been an empire. It was the German people’s right to demand that their historical position be returned to them. This much of Hitler’s assertions was a true reflection of his aims, to restore a German Empire. The rest of what he told Welles was not simply false; it was also contrary to what he had written in
Mein Kampf
. Hitler assured Welles that Germany had no desire to dominate non-German peoples, only to ensure that they posed no security threat. Finally, he insisted on the return of German colonies taken by the Versailles agreement, as Germany needed them for their raw materials and as places for German emigration. In
Mein Kampf
, Hitler had argued that Germans required not colonies but contiguous land for food production and emigration. He now told Welles that, compared to the United States, Germany had to produce ten times the amount of food per square kilometer. Because of its population density, Germany, he insisted, needed Lebensraum in order to feed itself.
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He did not remind Welles what he had written on this subject in
Mein Kampf
, that strong peoples take what they need by force, as this was the natural order of things. Equally telling in Hitler’s comments was what he did not say. He avoided any reference to the Soviet Union—an omission that Welles noted in his report.

As the meeting drew to a close Hitler remarked, “The German people today are united as one man, and I have the support of every German.” There could be no hope for peace, he declared, until the English and French will to destroy Germany was itself destroyed. He assured Welles that Germany was strong enough to prevail. If it were not, then “we would all go down together . . . whether that be for better or worse.” Welles expressed the fleeting hope that if peace could be found, then no nation would need to go down. Hitler assured Welles that Germany’s aim, whether through war or otherwise, was a just peace. On that note, their meeting ended.

If Welles and Roosevelt hoped to gauge Hitler’s underlying drivers, the interview provided some useful information. It underscored Hitler’s intention to create an empire in Europe. If they had compared his present claims with his statements in
Mein Kampf
, they could have
spotted the inconsistencies, which in turn should have led them to expect Hitler to widen the war for control of eastern lands. In short, this meeting confirmed what they already expected. It did not provide any great revelations. Yet the way in which Hitler presented his aims did suggest that his key driver was messianic. Economic hegemony was not his prime concern. Instead, he coolly explained that he intended to restore Germany’s historic greatness as an empire. He concluded the meeting with the notion that all countries would go down together, suggesting a fanatical devotion to his cause. For Roosevelt and Welles to know whether Hitler’s words genuinely reflected his beliefs or were instead mere rhetoric, they would have had to consider Hitler’s pattern breaks.

In the search for any last possible clues to Hitler’s underlying motivations, Welles met with Field Marshall Hermann Göring. Rumors had spread of a possible rift between Hitler and Göring. Welles needed to see if such a division existed and could be exploited. Deep within a national game reserve, Göring had constructed a massive monument to his own bloated sense of self-importance. After a ninety-minute drive from Berlin through a heavy snowfall and biting winds, Welles was delivered in an open car to the Field Marshall’s sanctuary at Karin Hall. From the entrance to the reserve, they rode another ten miles through pine and birch forest, past Göring’s personal collection of rare aurochs, the stocky bull-like ancestor of the domestic cattle. Göring’s dwellings were still in process of being expanded. When finished, they planned to rival the size of Washington’s National Art Gallery. Inside the main log cabin, glass cases lined the walls, housing ornate cups, bowls, beakers, and various objects of solid gold.

Although Welles found his manner frank and unaffected, Göring’s physical appearance suggested otherwise. Swathed in a white tunic emblazoned with brilliant insignias, Göring sported an iron cross around his neck and a monocle dangling on a black cord. His girth was monstrous, his arms and thighs tremendous. His hands resembled the “digging paws of a badger.” Yet those thickish fingers bore dazzling gems. The ring on his right hand glittered with six enormous diamonds. The one on his left held an emerald a good square inch across.
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Göring made a sympathetic impression on Welles, but he left the Undersecretary with the clear idea that Hitler had hardened in his
stance. The only verbal jousting in the course of their three-hour conversation came when Welles again brought up the touchy issue of Nazi treatment of the Jews. Göring maintained that he had always wished for positive relations with the United States but that German racial policies had proved a sticking point. Americans needed to understand, Göring explained, that if German policies seemed hard, it was because these methods were necessary for exerting counter-pressure. Then he pointed to America’s own racial policies, observing that colored peoples were not even permitted to travel in the same railway cars as whites. Welles somewhat weakly countered that this was only in a small part of the United States, and he added that America even had a colored Congressman.
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Welles failed to note this exchange in his own account of the interview. Later, Welles’s brilliant career as a diplomat would meet a bitter end when his enemies within the State Department pressured President Roosevelt to sack him for having made homosexual advances to the Negro porters on a railway car in September 1940. Roosevelt had tried to protect his friend and trusted envoy, but he ultimately felt compelled to remove Welles from the government. At a time when homosexuality was widely considered immoral behavior, Welles’s rivals held the upper hand.

Göring closed their conversation by insincerely wishing Welles success on his ostensible peace mission. If there were any way of averting the coming war, he declared, then the U.S. government “will have accomplished the greatest thing which human beings could desire.” But Göring added fatalistically that he believed the war was unavoidable.
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What led President Roosevelt to hold talks with the enemy of America’s closest ally, Great Britain, while a war was already underway? A cynical interpretation for FDR’s actions is that, in an election year, the President wanted to garner votes from those who favored peace at all cost. A consummate politician, the domestic implications of foreign policy were never far from Roosevelt’s considerations, but this explanation is not sufficient. Had political posturing been the sole reason for the Welles mission, FDR could have gained even more by sending a higher-level official in place of Welles. Secretary of State Cordell Hull, whom Roosevelt disliked, would have suited the purpose perfectly. Hull’s higher rank would have played even better in the American press. But the President wanted someone whose judgment he could trust. FDR
respected Welles’s abilities more than Hull’s. FDR and Welles had long family ties. Both he and Welles had attended Groton, the elite boarding school for upper-class boys. Welles had even served as an usher at FDR’s wedding. Roosevelt used Welles to circumvent the State Department. He could be counted on to preserve any truly valuable information for Roosevelt’s ears only. And it was information to enhance strategic empathy that Roosevelt hoped Welles might glean.

Months after the Welles Mission had faded from the news, the President explained his thinking to Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long. On December 12, 1940, Long had entered the President’s study to discuss another matter, but the President first turned the conversation to the Welles trip. FDR told Long that he had expected a German spring offensive and he had wished that Welles might be able to delay Hitler’s plans by negotiating. Then the President confided that the only other reason for sending Welles to Europe was to learn what he could from Mussolini and Hitler. Sending Welles to Paris and London was just “window dressing.” It was necessary to keep up the appearance of balance. He already understood what the British and French thought. What Welles had gone to Europe for really was to get the low-down on Hitler and get Mussolini’s point of view.
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Only much later, at the close of 1942, did the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency) produce a psychological assessment of Hitler. This study represented the first formal attempt by the American government to engage in this type of analysis of an enemy’s underlying drivers. Completed on December 3, 1942, the report was not released to the public until the year 2000. From the vantage point of today, the study seems almost juvenile in some of its conclusions, particularly those focused on Hitler’s sex life. The anonymous authors proposed that the whip that Hitler often toted substituted for his lack of sexual potency and reflected sado-masochistic tendencies. They viewed his wild gesticulations when orating as whiplike motions. They maintained, perhaps accurately, that Hitler believed an audience should be treated like a woman—with decisiveness and control.

The study veered into dubious scientific validity when it postulated that Hitler’s sexuality was as dual-natured as his political views, suggesting that the authors grasped neither his sexuality nor his politics.
“He is both homosexual and heterosexual; both Socialist and fervent Nationalist; both man and woman.” Asserting that the Führer’s sexual situation was untenable and desperate, the authors claimed that Hitler sought a half-mother and half-sweetheart. Frustration over his failure to find such a partner had led him, the authors claimed, into “brooding isolation and artificially dramatized public life.”
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