Memoir and Biography Book Reviews -

In new book ‘Watching Darkness Fall,’ former US ambassador David McKean illustrates how antisemitism, apathy and internal politics set America back in the war against Germany. In 1938, William Dodd, the United States ambassador to Nazi Germany, publicly declared that Hitler wanted to kill all the Jews not just in Germany, but the entire European continent. Months later, the Kristallnacht pogroms indicated he was right. Despite Dodd’s perception, the US diplomatic corps overlooked a number of totalitarian threats at the time, according to “Watching Darkness Fall: FDR, His Ambassadors, and the Rise of Adolf Hitler,” a new book by David McKean. The author is himself a former US ambassador to Luxembourg under the Obama administration. The inspiration for the bo...

In March 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt approached politician James M. Cox to offer him what should have been a cushy gig: the ambassadorship to Germany. But Cox turned down the job. Germany was unstable and violent — and German Chancellor Adolf Hitler's paramilitary army had started to attack and jail thousands of its own citizens. The job remained open for months as candidates were summarily rejected. In early June 1933, Roosevelt's commerce secretary suggested an alternative: William Dodd, a professor at the University of Chicago who spoke German and received his graduate degree in Germany. Roosevelt offered Dodd the job, who accepted and went to Berlin with his wife, son and daughter. Roosevelt emphasized that Dodd needed to be a model of American values in Nazi Germany. But th...

Memoir and Biography Book Reviews

Why did the US ignore diplomats who boldly raised an alarm about Hitler before WWII?

William Dodd: The U.S. Ambassador In Hitler’s Berlin