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In 1934 Hitler sent word from Berlin to the White House encouraging President Roosevelt to be proud of his “heroic efforts in the interests of the American people.”
THREAD https://twitter.com/ReaganWorld/status/1319456500205547520
THREAD https://twitter.com/ReaganWorld/status/1319456500205547520
The President’s “successful battle against economic distress,” wrote Hitler, “is being followed by the entire German people with interest and admiration.”
Also in 1934 the Nazi Party’s newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, applauded Roosevelt’s “dictatorial” measures. “We, too, as German National Socialists are looking toward America. . . . Roosevelt is carrying out experiments and they are bold."
"We, too, fear only the possibility that they might fail.” Many of the most favorable reviews of Roosevelt’s books, Looking Forward (1933) and On Our Way (1934), were written by German critics who saw the New Deal and National Socialism as parallel enterprises.
In 1934 a biography by the German author Helmut Magers, Roosevelt: A Revolutionary with Common Sense, lauded the New Deal as “an authoritarian revolution” with “surprising similarities” to the Nazi seizure of power.
Hitler himself saw a kindred soul in the American president. He told the U.S. ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, that he was “in accord with the President in the view that the virtue of duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline should dominate the entire people.
These moral demands which the President places before every individual citizen of the United States are also the quintessence of the German state philosophy; which finds its expression in the slogan ‘The Public Weal Transcends the Interest of the Individual.’”
Dodd’s successor reported to Roosevelt in 1938 that he had told Hitler that “you were very much interested in certain phases of the sociological effort, notably for the youth and workmen.”
Even as late as 1940, when it was apparent that Roosevelt was eager to intervene militarily against Germany, Joseph Goebbels’s weekly newspaper Das Reich continued to insist on a kinship between Nazi and New Deal policies.
An article entitled “Hitler and Roosevelt: A German Success — An American Attempt” lamented that the American “parliamentary-democratic system” kept the New Deal from becoming fully realized.
According to the historian John A. Garraty, “It is clear, however, that early New Deal depression policies seemed to Nazis essentially like their own and the role of Roosevelt not very different from the Führer’s.”
