Vol. 136: A summit to remember

When FDR met Hitler

This month’s surprisingly successful Trump-Putin summit demonstrated once again that there is no problem so great or so complicated that it can’t be solved by people of intelligence and goodwill. It reminded me— and probably you, as well— of another historic meeting that similarly defied all expectations: the momentous Roosevelt-Hitler summit of May 1940.

At the time, you may recall, Hitler had already conquered much of Europe and was in the process of gobbling up France. But the United States had not yet entered World War II. So, when FDR invited Hitler to meet him at Bangor Air National Guard base in Maine, the much-maligned Fuhrer welcomed the chance to appear on a friendly stage.

Roosevelt arrived first and awaited Hitler on a red carpet spread across the runway. As Hitler descended from his plane and approached, Roosevelt applauded. Then the two leaders warmly shook hands and smiled.

It was a remarkable moment for Hitler— a leader shunned by most Western nations after Germany launched its full-scale invasion of Poland in September 1939. Since then, the Fuhrer’s international travel had been largely limited to nations friendly to Germany, such as Italy and the Soviet Union.

Hitler spoke, Roosevelt listened

That the Maine summit happened at all was a victory for Hitler. But the welcome he received surpassed the Reich’s wildest dreams. In nine short months, Hitler had gone from being a pariah of the West to being welcomed on U.S. soil like a partner and friend.

In an apparently unscripted moment, Hitler accepted a lift to the airbase terminal in Roosevelt’s armored limousine instead of driving in his own Berlin-plated presidential car. As the vehicle pulled away, the cameras zoomed in on Hitler and FDR sitting in the back seat and laughing.

Journalists in the room with Hitler and Roosevelt had been led to expect a press conference. Instead, the two leaders gave statements and took no questions from reporters.

Hitler spoke first. He praised the "constructive atmosphere of mutual respect" of the "neighborly" talks, then launched into a condensed history of Germany’s grievances against Poland as well as his people’s need for lebensraum— living space. As he spoke, Roosevelt sat in silence.

‘Feel the warmth’

It was several minutes before the German chancellor mentioned what he called the "situation in France" — ostensibly the catalyst for the summit. When he did, it was to state that although an unspecified "agreement" had been reached, the "root causes" of the conflict had to be eliminated before peace could be achieved.

That phrase set off alarm bells in Paris and London. Since the start of the war, it had become shorthand for a series of intractable and maximalist demands that Hitler said stood in the way of a ceasefire. Those demands included recognition of German sovereignty over Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, and the Netherlands, as well as France’s agreeing to demilitarization, neutrality, no foreign military involvement, and new elections. Essentially, these demands amounted to capitulation— unacceptable to Paris, but clearly, even after nine months of bloody conflict, still paramount to Berlin. With this, it was clear that there was no deal.

On the other hand, Roosevelt noted, “You could feel the warmth” between the two leaders. He further elaborated that he didn't speak to Hitler in front of other European leaders because he felt it "would be disrespectful" to Hitler.

Legitimate complaints

Wait a minute. You know this is a joke, right? For the above paragraphs, I simply took a BBC account of this month’s Trump-Putin summit and plugged in Roosevelt’s and Hitler’s names and countries in the appropriate places. FDR knew better than to cozy up to history’s most infamous war criminal. He would have instinctively looked down, not up, at a world-class thug. (True, FDR met Stalin at Yalta in 1945. But Stalin was our ally at the time, unlike Putin.)

And, yes, Putin may not be the second coming of Hitler. But he sure seems to be following Hitler’s playbook. Consider:

— Hitler took Germany’s defeat in World War I as a personal humiliation; Putin took the downfall of the Soviet Union as a personal humiliation.

— Hitler seized on a legitimate German complaint: the unduly harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles after World War I. Putin has seized on a legitimate Russian complaint: the West’s tendency to treat Russia as a defeated enemy after Russians courageously overthrew their own Soviet masters in 1991.

—Hitler claimed to protect persecuted Germans in Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland; Putin claims to protect persecuted Russians in Ukraine’s Donbas region.

— In 1936, Hitler violated the Treaty of Locarno, which 11 years earlier had demilitarized the German lands west of the Rhine in exchange for the withdrawal of Allied troops; Putin, by invading Crimea in 2014 and Ukraine in 2022, violated the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, in which Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal in exchange for security assurances from Russia (as well as the U.S. and the United Kingdom).

Soldiers in disguise

— Hitler scapegoated Jews for political purposes; Putin’s government whipped up anti-Semitism for political purposes while simultaneously denouncing the Ukrainian government as “neo-Nazis, Russophobes, and anti-Semites” (even though Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is himself Jewish). His reason for invading Ukraine, Putin said in 2022, was to "demilitarize and denazify" Ukraine.

— Hitler disguised German soldiers as Polish soldiers attacking a German radio station as his pretext for invading Poland in 1939; Putin dispatched undercover Russian operatives, posing as “pro-Russian activists,” to take over the Crimea as well as public buildings in eastern Ukraine before his full-fledged invasion in 2022.

— Hitler utilized an aggressive disinformation campaign to spread hatred and fear against his country’s perceived enemies; Putin has done much the same thing. (Among my favorites: The Russian government faked stories of Ukrainian refugees fleeing to Russia, using footage of a border crossing between Ukraine and Poland.)

— Hitler demonized and silenced his critics; so has Putin. When a Russian historian, Andrei Zubov, compared Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 to Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938, Zubov was fired from his teaching position for writing articles that “contradict Russia’s foreign policy and inflict careless, irresponsible criticism on the actions of the state.”

Hitler’s bluff

Of course, Hitler himself might not have become Hitler if the free world had stood up to him sooner. When Hitler sent a token military force into the Rhineland in 1936, in violation of the Locarno Treaty, his defense minister, General Werner von Blomberg, gave orders for the troops to withdraw should the French oppose them. “That almost certainly would have been the end of Hitler,” William Shirer remarked in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich— a judgment with which Hitler himself concurred.

“A retreat on our part,” Hitler conceded later, as reported by his interpreter Paul Schmidt, “would have spelled collapse…. The 48 hours after the march into the Rhineland were the most nerve-wracking in my life. If the French had then marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance.”

But the French never made the slightest move. French diplomats did fly to London to seek Britain’s support for a joint military action. But Britain’s Lord Lothian refused. “The Germans, after all, are only going into their own back garden,” he explained, sounding much like today’s Western observers who still accept Putin’s claim that Crimea and even eastern Ukraine have really been Russian lands all along.

Can you feel the warmth?

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com