Stalin, however, couldn’t accept that his allies meant what they said about postwar goodwill. He could not imagine a world without conflict: he believed that Hitler’s anticommunism would outlive Germany’s defeat and that his allies, who would soon revert to their prewar anti-Bolshevism, would find a new generation of German anti-Communists to strike against socialism. The coming era would not be a time for continued collaboration with the West but a new chapter in the struggle between capitalism and communism, which Stalin was preparing to meet by seizing all the advantages he could. Surely there is some basis to Stalin’s expectations—neither Churchill nor Roosevelt nor many of their principal advisers took a strictly benign view of Stalin and the Soviets; they were all too ready to share Stalin’s convictions about the inevitable incompatibility of their respective systems. Nevertheless, by refusing to entertain the possibility that more accommodating actions toward the West might result in long-term good relations, Stalin helped plunge the world back into a new round of tensions and conflict that risked even greater devastation than suffered during World War II.
On April 12, the day after his last message to Churchill, Roosevelt died suddenly at his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia. The president’s death stunned and pained both Churchill and Stalin. “I am much weakened in every way by his loss,” Churchill told an aide. He wrote Eleanor Roosevelt that he had “lost a dear and cherished friendship which was forged in the fire of war.” To Harry Hopkins, he said, “We have lost one of our greatest friends and one of our most valiant champions of the causes for which we fight. I feel a very painful personal loss quite apart from the ties of public action which bound us so closely together. I had a true affection for Franklin.”
“Stalin’s fondness for Roosevelt was as genuine a diplomatic friendship as he ever managed with any imperialist,” Stalin’s biographer writes. When Stalin paid his respects to Harriman, he was “deeply distressed” and held Harriman’s hand for thirty seconds. He later described Roosevelt in private as “a great statesman, a clever, educated, far-sighted and liberal leader who prolonged the life of capitalism.”
In the larger scheme of things, Stalin’s regard for the president was of small consequence. Neither Roosevelt’s nor Churchill’s continuing presence on the scene was a deterrent to Stalin’s determination to assure Russia’s security and international power. Roosevelt’s passing and the presence of a new president in whom Stalin had no trust only stiffened his resolve to advance Russia’s might. A wartime need for each other gave the alliance a limited life. Once the Nazi danger disappeared, the innate differences between the Soviets and the West became a force that no political leader in Britain or the United States could overcome.
Stalin’s suspicions of the ill will he believed foreign leaders harbored toward him, joined with nationalistic strivings for security from attack and ideological convictions about inevitable conflicts between capitalists and Communists, led him to reject Allied initiatives to promote long-term cooperation. Whatever the blunders of his Western partners in inflaming his distrust, it was Stalin, above all, who assured that the postwar world would continue its traditional rivalry among the great powers in what came to be called the Cold War.
3
COLLAPSE AND RENEWAL
I renounce war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatred it arouses, for the dictatorships it puts in place of democracy, for the starvation that stalks after it.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick, liberal Baptist minister of New York’s Riverside Church
Roosevelt’s death left Churchill and Stalin worried about dealing with Harry S. Truman, the new president they had never met and couldn’t imagine being the equal of his predecessor.
Churchill thought it extraordinary that “Roosevelt had not made his deputy and potential successor thoroughly acquainted with the whole story and brought him into the decisions that were being taken. This proved of grave disadvantage to our affairs.” Truman had to step “at a bound from a position where he has little information and less power into supreme authority. How could Mr. Truman know and weigh the issues at stake at this climax of the war?”
It was a telling point: Roosevelt met with Truman only twice during the eighty-two days of his fourth term, and their discussions were brief and perfunctory. Roosevelt apparently believed that his health problems would not cut short his life, or at least would not affect him before the war ended. Moreover, he didn’t seem to think that Truman needed to know about the atomic bomb or postwar plans. This may have had less to do with Roosevelt’s limited regard for his vice president than his own uncertainty about whether the bomb would be available or would even need to be used. Always the “chameleon on plaid,” as Herbert Hoover called him in 1932, Roosevelt disliked planning too far ahead. Like Lincoln, who freely acknowledged that events shaped him more than he shaped them, Roosevelt may have said nothing about postwar plans because he had them on hold until time and circumstance dictated what they would be.
It may also have been that Roosevelt could not imagine dying and having Truman as his replacement. He should have remembered what he said in a speech on the eve of the 1932 presidential election: “There is no indispensable man.” Telling Truman about the bomb and confiding his hopes for the postwar world would have cost Roosevelt little time or energy. But it ran counter to his typical dealings with political associates; taking others into his confidence was simply not what he did. When Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes told FDR that he was the most difficult man he had ever worked with, Roosevelt asked, “Because I get too hard at times?” Ickes replied, “No”; it was because “you won’t talk frankly even with people who are loyal to you. You keep your cards close up against your belly. You never put them on the table.” And although this technique had served Roosevelt well throughout his career, it was a mistake to ignore the possibility that he might die and leave his vice president unprepared to deal with inevitable end-of-war problems.
Like Churchill, Stalin had great doubts about Roosevelt’s successor and his preparation to deal with postwar challenges. Unlike Churchill, however, familiarity bred not regard but disdain. Stalin simply could not believe that Truman could measure up to his predecessor. After meeting the new president at Potsdam in July, Stalin said, “They couldn’t be compared. Truman’s neither educated nor clever.”
It was easy to underestimate “the little man from Missouri,” as critics described him. At five feet eight inches and 150 pounds, he was not an imposing figure. Poor eyesight—uncorrected vision of 20/50 in his right eye and 20/400 in his left eye, which made him close to blind without thick glasses—gave him an owl-like appearance and added to impressions of someone who had to grope his way through life. A double-breasted gray or blue suit with a neatly folded handkerchief in his breast pocket and a bow tie suggested, as his daughter Margaret said, a fellow who “had just stepped from a bandbox.” He was an undeniably conventional midwestern sort: his dress, manner of speaking—the Missouri twang—Masonic ring, and outlook on the world were familiar to anyone who had grown up in any of the country’s heartland towns or small cities.
The trajectory of Truman’s life and political career deepened impressions of his ordinariness. His early years in Independence, Missouri, a suburb of Kansas City, where after high school, he worked as a bank clerk and then with his father on a family farm, gave no hint of his exceptional future. Service in World War I as a captain of artillery with a Missouri National Guard regiment added to views of him as a fine young man whose patriotism and conformity fit comfortably into the local elected offices he held in the ten years after 1924, including presiding judge of Jackson County, which made him the chief executive officer or mayor of Kansas City. His election to the U.S. Senate in 1934 seemed explicable not by any special personal attributes but by his ties to the corrupt Pendergast machine and by Roosevelt’s popularity, which tipped numerous races to unimpressive Democratic candidates.
Truman’s six years in the Senate an
d narrow reelection in 1940 seemed to confirm his standing as a relatively minor senator who would never rise higher. His amiability and loyalty to the party and the president made him one of the Senate’s workhorses rather than one of its show horses like Louisiana’s flamboyant Huey Long, whose ambition for higher office was an open secret.
In his second term, Truman’s chairmanship of a subcommittee investigating waste and profiteering in the country’s defense buildup projected him onto the national consciousness, including his appearance on the cover of Time on March 8, 1943, making him a potential vice presidential nominee in 1944. A division in the Democratic Party between liberal supporters of sitting vice president Henry Wallace, a man known for his eccentricities and hopes for world harmony, and southern conservatives favorable to South Carolina’s Jimmy Byrnes, a former senator, Supreme Court associate justice, and war mobilization director, known as “Assistant President,” opened the way to Truman’s candidacy. Although he had no close ties to Roosevelt and was dismissively described as “the Second Missouri Compromise,” Truman’s uncontroversial party standing made him the ideal middle-ground alternative as FDR’s running mate.
Truman’s sudden elevation to the presidency left Americans at home and their allies abroad demoralized about the country’s leadership at a time when so many crucial postwar issues faced the nation and the world. Because he was mindful of the universal doubts about his capacity to replace Franklin Roosevelt, Truman made every effort to indicate that he would be fulfilling FDR’s designs.
Within hours after Roosevelt’s death, Truman cabled Churchill that he intended to preserve the “solid relations which you and the late President had forged between our countries.” He declared himself ready to address the “urgent problems requiring our immediate and joint consideration” and added: “I am, of course, familiar with the exchanges which you and President Roosevelt have had between yourselves and with Marshal Stalin. I also know what President Roosevelt had in mind as the next step.” Of course he didn’t know, or even know about the atomic bomb; nor did Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, who helped draft the cable, know any more than Truman. Truman’s message was small comfort to Churchill.
Truman’s assumption of power was even more disturbing to Stalin and the Soviets. They knew that two days after Hitler had attacked them in 1941, Truman had said publicly, “If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances. Neither of them think anything of their pledged word.”
The only ones buoyed by the news of Roosevelt’s death were Adolf Hitler and the Nazi leaders around him. When Joseph Goebbels, his propaganda minister, called to give him the news, Hitler excitedly told Albert Speer, his armaments minister, “Here, read this! Here … we have the great miracle that I always foretold. Who’s right now? The war is not lost. Read it. Roosevelt is dead!” Hitler seemed to think that “the hand of Providence” had rescued him and Germany from defeat.
It was a characteristic expression of Hitler’s distorted, grandiose thinking. Journalists, biographers, historians, and social psychologists have struggled to understand how so ruthless and ultimately destructive a man could have won and sustained a hold on as advanced a nation as Germany, with a history of artistic, scientific, and technological achievements the envy of any society. One would like to think that the events that brought Hitler to power and allowed him to drive his country and the world into such a disastrous war and led so many Germans to join him in the annihilation campaign against world Jewry were unique and could not reoccur. But given the conflicts and bloodletting that have followed World War II, the irrational passions that gave someone like Hitler so much power remain a cautionary tale the world does well to recall. His ruthlessness and ability to put this ruthlessness into action may be more of an object lesson than anyone would care to think.
Hitler’s troubled childhood and early adult years, notable for a father who beat him, his failing grades in high school, which he quit at age sixteen, his rejection by Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts, his frustrated artistic ambitions, and his homelessness and residence in a poor workingmen’s shelter in 1909–10 after his parents had died may partly explain his grandiosity, paranoia, and messianic obsessions—a thousand-year Reich, a world without Jews.
Hitler’s exposure to anti-Semitic writings, including Martin Luther’s On the Jews and Their Lies, his abrasive clashes with Jewish school cohorts in Linz, Austria, where he spent part of his adolescence, and the culture of Vienna, a hotbed of anti-Semitism where he moved in 1905, may have shaped his hatred of “international Jewry.” But his rage passed the bounds of accepted anti-Semitic ideas. For Hitler, the fight against Jews represented an apocalyptic struggle to overcome a menace that he saw as a threat to not only Germany but the entire world.
None of the preludes in Hitler’s formative years can fully explain his life story. Like Hitler, other young Germans suffered physical and psychological abuse and were also exposed to anti-Semitic or other ethnic and religious bigotry, but they did not become tyrants who single-mindedly devoted themselves to the destruction of Jewry and millions of others in a war to conquer Europe and become a memorable world figure. No one can confidently reconstruct the internal forces that made Hitler, Hitler. The search for the sources of his megalomania and a description of his personality seem useful primarily as a warning against future infatuations with leaders promising national salvation through emotionally appealing but rationally simplistic nostrums.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine the seminal events of the 1930s and ‘40s without Hitler. He played a central role in the world in those two decades. But it is also essential to recall the national and international circumstances that opened the way to Hitler’s extraordinary career in inflicting unprecedented suffering on Europe and much of the world. Germany’s defeat in World War I made Hitler’s nationalistic appeals and attacks on foreigners, including Jews, as the architects of the country’s postwar disarray especially appealing. The economic collapse of the 1930s that deepened the anguish of millions of Germans provided Hitler with an additional opportunity to exploit public discontent with promises of national salvation through National Socialism.
The outbreak of World War I in 1914 gave Hitler a chance to experience the exhilaration of surviving combat and winning medals for heroism. It gave him credentials as well to enter German politics as a devoted patriot determined to restore Germany’s power and honor after the humiliating surrender in 1918 that had reduced Germany’s territorial holdings and required her to pay huge reparations to the victors for damages caused by the war. Although born in Austria and not receiving German citizenship until 1932, Hitler was the convert who was more German than the Germans.
After leaving the army in 1920, Hitler joined the German Workers’ Party in Munich and became a leading figure in its ranks, changing the party’s name to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and calling attention to himself and the party’s platform with speeches denouncing the “November criminals,” the republican politicians who “stabbed the army in the back” by agreeing to a degrading peace treaty, the Jews, Communists, Social Democrats, and anyone else supporting the Weimar Republic. In 1923, after a runaway inflation triggered by the printing of millions of reichsmarks to meet reparation payments imposed by the Versailles Treaty, Hitler led a failed coup against the Bavarian and Berlin governments that landed him in prison for eight months.
His brief imprisonment was a small price to pay for an action that won him a national reputation as a forceful nationalist. The appearance of his two-volume political testament Mein Kampf, written in 1924 when he was in prison and 1925 when he was barred from public speaking after his release, gave him a further hold on the public’s imagination. His depiction of an apocalyptic conflict between Jews and Aryans and the need for an all-out war against the Marxists, who he depicted as
nothing more than agents of Jewish ambition for national and international control, provided a simple formula for the rebirth and dominance of Germany that resonated with Germans across all social lines. However distorted, Hitler’s description of a Jewish conspiracy to destroy Aryan peoples in the service of their ambition for world control was the shared view of many other Germans.
The onset and spread of the Great Depression in 1930–31 greatly strengthened Hitler’s appeal. In September 1928, the Nazis won only 810,000 votes, or 2.6 percent of the national vote, and twelve seats in the Reichstag. Two years later, this leaped to 6.4 million votes, or 18.3 percent of the national total, giving the Nazis 107 elected deputies. By January 1933, Hitler had used the economic crisis and immobility of a divided government to become chancellor. After a crisis in February provoked by a Reichstag fire blamed on the Communists, Hitler won passage of his Enabling Act to suppress competing political parties. The death in August 1934 of President Paul von Hindenburg, a national war hero and a major remaining restraint on Nazi consolidation of power, allowed the cabinet to abolish the presidency and declare Hitler Germany’s führer, or supreme commander of the state, the military, and the Nazi Party. A national plebiscite confirmed Hitler’s assumption of total control with 84 percent popular approval.
Between 1934 and 1940 an expansion of the economy, partly engineered by massive defense spending to rebuild the German army and develop an air force, combined with a series of foreign policy successes to make Hitler almost universally popular at home and feared abroad. The occupation of the Rhineland in 1935, the triumph at Munich in September 1938, when the British and French governments acquiesced in Hitler’s demands for return of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia, the lightning victory over Poland in 1939, and the conquest of Western Europe, with the stunning defeat and occupation of France in 1940, moved Germans to celebrate Hitler as a godly figure, a rescuer who was restoring Germany to its role as a great nation. A seventeen-year-old girl declared him “a great man, a genius, a person sent to us from heaven.”