Question: Did FDR hate Germany prior to 1933

Hello,

I´ve read several timelines which indicate that FDR had a strong dislke towards Germany before Hitlers rise to power, and I wanted to know if that´s true or if it´s just a common theme for alternate history, and if yes, then why?

I didn´t find any thread to post this question, so I posted it here and I hope it´s okay.
 
I do not know, but after WW1, there was residual dislike and distrust for Germans, including German-Americans.

When Hitler took strongarm power in 1933, there was a kindling of ethnic pride among German-Americans. The movement, founded in Buffalo, NY in 1936, was known as The Bund. Members displayed Third Reich logos, as WW2 was still in the future, the Holocaust had not yet happened and anti-Semitism was prevalent on both sides of the Atlantic. The movement practically shut down in 1939 and disappeared after 1941 to the point it was covered up. It is recalled very little today, but we must remember it was over ethnic pride first, German government second.
 
His cousin TR had lived in Germany two years as a child. He still retained some command of the German language as a adult. Which was useful when begging for votes.
 

Deleted member 1487

From what I've read Roosevelt had some bad childhood experiences in Germany which left a bad taste in his mouth about the country reportedly his entire life:
https://www.captivatinghistory.com/franklin-d-roosevelts-childhood-and-education/
During this time, Roosevelt began formulating opinions on other countries and their people. Franklin loved France, along with the people who lived there. On the other hand, he claimed that Germany and its citizens were rude and that they constantly said they were better than everyone else. There is a possibility that he inherited his opinions on Germany from his parents who thought that the people were “filthy … German swine.”[viii]
Marrin, Albert. FDR and the American Crisis. 2015.
 

Deleted member 1487

I do not know, but after WW1, there was residual dislike and distrust for Germans, including German-Americans.

When Hitler took strongarm power in 1933, there was a kindling of ethnic pride among German-Americans. The movement, founded in Buffalo, NY in 1936, was known as The Bund. Members displayed Third Reich logos, as WW2 was still in the future, the Holocaust had not yet happened and anti-Semitism was prevalent on both sides of the Atlantic. The movement practically shut down in 1939 and disappeared after 1941 to the point it was covered up. It is recalled very little today, but we must remember it was over ethnic pride first, German government second.
Seriously? The Bund was about Nazism. Even the Nazi government in Germany was embarrassed by them and their antics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_American_Bund
In March 1936, the German American Bund was established as a follow-up organization for the Friends of New Germany in Buffalo, New York.[6][11] The Bund elected a German-born American citizen Fritz Julius Kuhn as its leader (Bundesführer).[12] Kuhn was a veteran of the Bavarian infantry during World War I and an Alter Kämpfer (old fighter) of the Nazi Party who, in 1934, was granted American citizenship. Kuhn was initially effective as a leader and was able to unite the organization and expand its membership but came to be seen simply as an incompetent swindler and liar.[6]

Kuhn and a few other Bundmen traveled to Berlin to attend the 1936 Summer Olympics. During the trip, he visited the Reich Chancellery, where his picture was taken with Hitler.[6] This act did not constitute an official Nazi approval for Kuhn's organization: German Ambassador to the United States Hans-Heinrich Dieckhoff expressed his disapproval and concern over the group to Berlin, causing distrust between the Bund and the Nazi regime.[6]

On March 1, 1938, the Nazi government decreed that no Reichsdeutsche [German nationals] could be a member of the Bund, and that no Nazi emblems were to be used by the organization.[6] This was done both to appease the U.S. and to distance Germany from the Bund, which was increasingly a cause of embarrassment with its rhetoric and actions.[6]

In 1939, a New York tax investigation determined that Kuhn had embezzled $14,000 from the Bund. The Bund did not seek to have Kuhn prosecuted, operating on the principle (Führerprinzip) that the leader had absolute power. However, New York City's district attorney prosecuted him in an attempt to cripple the Bund. On December 5, 1939, Kuhn was sentenced to two and a half to five years in prison for tax evasion and embezzlement.[23]
 
Hate is a strong word, but I think HW Brands wrote in his FDR bio that Roosevelt had some tendencies in him that had him lean against Germany because of experiences from his childhood, reinforced by the first war.
 

Md139115

Banned
But yet he was on record as proudly supporting the Boers in their war due to his Dutch heritage, and he enjoyed torturing Churchill about that.
 
But yet he was on record as proudly supporting the Boers in their war due to his Dutch heritage, and he enjoyed torturing Churchill about that.

There was "some" anti-British feeling among the more rabid or unstable American power-elites right into WW II (Joseph Kennedy for example.). How much Roosevelt reflected in this leaning, this "Anti-English because they tricked us into WW I" attitude is very debatable. There is little, though, to debate about Roosevelt and the criminal German regime by 1937. Roosevelt and many of his contemporaries, both of the American left and the American right, came to the conclusion that the regime in Berlin had usurped the German constitution, was engaged in an illegal expansionist and militaristic course of action that violated international law and thus had made Germany a pariah nation to be "quarantined".
 
I do not know, but after WW1, there was residual dislike and distrust for Germans, including German-Americans.

Actually, what is surprising is how quickly wartime hatred of the "Huns" faded. The US in the 1920's took for granted that Germany was no longer a threat [1] and American public opinion was if anything more critical toward the former Entente powers (for being too grudging in paying their debts, for the position they took on naval disarmament at Geneva in 1927, etc.--also this was the decade when "revisionist" historians started to argue that the Entente had tricked the US into joining the War). The US played a significant role both in persuading the French to end their occupation of the Ruhr and in getting the Locarno agreements adopted. https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/wcfia/files/579_mythofusisol.pdf

John Lukacs in A Thread of Years once observed that the 1920s was a decade not only of widespread sympathy for Germany in the US--largely because of disillusionment over the war and the Versailles Treaty--but also the decade when German-Americans really "arrived": "Such different people as Babe Ruth, Mencken, and Hoover were all of German-American origin. They even looked German: roundheaded and round-faced, heavier, stockier..." http://books.google.com/books?id=5CNjTlVKKSMC&pg=PA206

[1] As FDR noted in his 1928 Foreign Affairs article "Our Foreign Policy: A Democratic View" "The German fleet is gone."
 
In the late 19th century, Germans were the largest single immigrant ethnic group to the US, and by the thirties, they were a generation farther removed from Europe than those who arrived a little later. The common challenge of the Great Depression became a uniting factor for Americans in general.
 
One of FDR's top advisors during the start of the New Deal was German descended Adolph Berle. He also worked well with Senator Robert Wagner (child of German immigrants), and one of his top cabinet loyalists, Harold Ickes, was part German, as was Al Smith who was his mentor of sorts in the 1920's. (Smith was one quarter German).
 
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