Roosevelt's appeal to Hitler and Mussolini

On the evening of 14 April 1939 the President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, sent Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini two identically worded telegrams. In them he put a question that no leader of a democratic power had yet put to the dictators so openly: were they prepared to give an assurance that their armed forces would not attack or invade the territory of 31 named independent states of Europe and the Middle East, for at least ten years and preferably twenty-five? In return the President promised that the United States would take part in talks on the limitation of armaments and the opening up of world trade. The text was released to the press in Washington before noon on 15 April. Mussolini responded with mockery in a speech on the Capitol, and Hitler, after two weeks of preparation, in a great speech to the Reichstag on 28 April in which he ridiculed the President’s letter point by point.

Spring 1939

Six months earlier, at the height of the Sudeten crisis, Roosevelt had twice appealed to Hitler for a peaceful settlement of the dispute with Czechoslovakia. Munich, however, had brought peace for only a few months. On 15 March 1939 the Wehrmacht occupied Bohemia and Moravia, and for the first time Hitler incorporated into the Reich lands not inhabited by Germans. A week later Lithuania, under threat of force, surrendered Klaipėda (Memel) to Germany, while Berlin pressed Poland ever more insistently for Gdańsk (Danzig) and an extraterritorial route across Pomerania. On 31 March the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, announced the British guarantee to Poland in the House of Commons. On Good Friday, 7 April, Italy invaded Albania, and on 13 April Britain and France announced guarantees for Romania and Greece. Europe was waiting for the next blow.

The United States was still bound by the Neutrality Acts, and most Americans wanted to hear nothing of the country being drawn into European quarrels. Roosevelt could neither promise nor threaten anything. He could, however, use the authority of his office to confront the dictators publicly with a question to which any answer would be awkward for them. He prepared the text together with the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull. The same day, in a speech marking Pan American Day, he warned that the nations of the Americas could not be indifferent to what was happening across the oceans.

The text of the appeal

The President began by observing that “hundreds of millions” of people were living in constant fear of a new war, and that a war, even one fought on other continents, would bear heavily on the nations of the Western Hemisphere as well. He recalled his appeal of the previous year and noted that the course of events had again turned towards the threat of force. Without naming names, he listed how in recent times three nations in Europe and one in Africa had lost their independent existence, and a vast territory of another independent nation in the Far East had been occupied by a neighbour. He meant Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Ethiopia and China. He added that there were rumours of further acts of aggression being planned, which he trusted were untrue.

He reminded Hitler that he had repeatedly declared that neither he nor the German people wanted war. “If this is true there need be no war,” he wrote. International disputes could be settled at the conference table, but it was no answer to a call for peaceful discussion to demand an assurance in advance of a favourable verdict. In conference rooms, as in courts, weapons were left at the door.

Hence the key question. Roosevelt asked whether Hitler and Mussolini would give an assurance that their armed forces would not attack or invade the territory or possessions of the following nations: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Great Britain and Ireland, France, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Russia, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Iraq, “the Arabias”, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Iran. The assurance was to hold for at least ten years and, “if we dare look that far ahead”, for a quarter of a century. The President promised to pass it on at once to the governments named and to ask them whether they would give Germany and Italy similar guarantees. In the atmosphere of peace that such mutual undertakings would create, the United States would gladly take part in discussions on two matters: the gradual relief of nations from “the crushing burden of armament” and the opening up of the avenues of world trade, so that every nation could buy and sell on equal terms and have access to raw materials. Political discussions he left to the governments directly concerned. In closing he warned that history would hold the leaders of great nations responsible for the lives and happiness of all people, “even unto the least”.

The world’s response

The State Department also sent the text to the governments of the American republics and of Canada, asking for comments, and before long every state of the Western Hemisphere had expressed support for the President’s initiative. The French Prime Minister, Édouard Daladier, wrote to Roosevelt in his own hand as early as 15 April that France associated itself with the idea of a twenty-five-year guarantee of non-aggression and disarmament. The British received the appeal with gratitude. Even the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Mikhail Kalinin, sent a telegram on 16 April with “warm congratulations”. Not everyone, though, was pleased with the wording of the list. The Irish government of Éamon de Valera took offence that Ireland appeared on it together with Great Britain, as though it were not a sovereign state.

In Berlin and Rome the appeal provoked fury and derision. Hermann Göring happened to be in Rome, and he and Mussolini dismissed the President’s letter with scorn. The German and Italian press wrote of American hypocrisy and recalled that the United States had itself won its territory by force. Mussolini did not reply to Roosevelt directly. On 20 April, in a speech on the Capitol in Rome, he referred to the appeal with evident disdain and made it clear that he did not believe in great international conferences. Polish diplomats, according to the American ambassador in Warsaw, received this tone with disappointment, seeing it as further proof that the Duce was becoming a prisoner of the Axis with Berlin. The Foreign Minister, Galeazzo Ciano, later confirmed to the American ambassador that the Capitol speech had been the Duce’s reply.

On the night of 16–17 April Hitler and his Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, decided that the Führer would reply at a session of the Reichstag called for 28 April, before an audience of the whole world. Beforehand the German Foreign Ministry put two questions to the governments of most of the states on Roosevelt’s list: did they feel threatened by Germany, and had the American President acted with their knowledge or consent? According to information that the Foreign Minister, Józef Beck, passed to the US ambassador in Warsaw, the enquiries went to Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Romania, Finland and the Baltic states, among others, whereas Poland was not asked. The small states bordering the Reich, frightened by the fate of Czechoslovakia, had no wish to provoke Berlin and replied that they did not feel threatened and had asked no one for anything.

The answer in the Reichstag

On 28 April Hitler spoke for more than two hours in the Kroll Opera House, where the deputies had met since the Reichstag fire. He devoted most of the speech to Roosevelt, answering his letter in twenty-one points. He listed the wrongs of the Treaty of Versailles, recalled that in 1919 the Germans had laid down their arms trusting in President Wilson’s assurances, and argued that it was the League of Nations, “the greatest conference of all time”, that had failed to solve a single problem – and that the United States itself had turned its back on it. To the charge that Germany was planning further acts of aggression he replied that these were groundless insinuations, and challenged the President to name the threatened states and the aggressor.

The best-remembered passage was the reading of the list of states. Hitler named them slowly and sarcastically, and the deputies responded with laughter. He announced that he had asked the states in question whether they felt threatened and whether they had asked the President for this initiative, and that all the answers had been negative, some of them emphatically so. He mocked Roosevelt for asking about the security of Ireland when its prime minister complained in his speeches of aggression not by Germany but by England, and observed that Palestine was occupied not by German troops but by British ones, suppressing the Arab revolt. Syria, he added, he could not ask at all, since it was under the occupation of “democratic states”. Finally he declared that Germany was ready to give each of the states named an assurance of non-aggression, but only on the basis of full reciprocity and only if the state in question asked for it. To the President he solemnly gave his assurance that the rumours of German designs on the Americas were “gross lies”.

He ended the speech with a personal tirade. “Mr Roosevelt, I understand perfectly well that the vastness of your country and its wealth allow you to feel responsible for the history of the whole world. My sphere is much smaller and more modest,” he said, before listing his achievements: the abolition of unemployment, the rebuilding of the economy, the tearing up of the “pages” of the Treaty of Versailles and the return of millions of Germans to the Reich “without bloodshed”. On the morning of the same day an official of the German Foreign Ministry handed the American chargé d’affaires the text of the speech and stated that it was the official reply to the President’s letter.

American diplomats in Berlin noted that the deputies reacted to the passages on Roosevelt mainly with laughter and jeers, whereas the real anger of the assembly was aroused by the sections dealing with Britain and Poland. For in the same speech Hitler renounced the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935 and the Polish–German non-aggression declaration of 1934. While telling the President that he was ready to conclude non-aggression pacts with anyone who asked for one, he was at the same time tearing up the only such pact he had actually concluded with a neighbour.

Significance

The appeal of 14 April could not stop Hitler, and Roosevelt probably did not expect it to. It did, however, achieve something else. Before public opinion, American opinion included, it set out the matter plainly: one side was offering talks and mutual guarantees, the other was answering with ridicule. In the United States the isolationists accused the President of meddling in European affairs, but the dictators’ reaction convinced many Americans that the threat was real. At the same time the appeal showed the limits of American policy: the President could promise nothing beyond participation in talks on disarmament and trade.

Hitler used his reply to offer non-aggression pacts to the small states on the list. The Scandinavian countries other than Denmark refused, whereas Denmark on 31 May, and Estonia and Latvia on 7 June, signed such pacts with Germany. They proved worthless. Over the next two years Germany attacked Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia, Greece and the Soviet Union – roughly one in three of the states Roosevelt had asked about. Italy attacked France, Greece and Egypt, and in Iraq in 1941 Germany backed an anti-British coup. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were occupied in 1940 by the Soviet Union, which in 1939 had greeted the President’s appeal with congratulations.

Roosevelt appealed once more to Hitler, and also to President Ignacy Mościcki and to the King of Italy, Victor Emmanuel III, at the end of August 1939, when war hung by a thread. After 1 September he called on the belligerents to refrain from bombing civilians, and then step by step led the United States from neutrality towards support for Hitler’s opponents: in November 1939 he allowed arms to be sold for cash, and in 1941 he pushed through the Lend-Lease Act. On 11 December 1941, four days after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the United States, and in his speech to the Reichstag he again settled scores at length with the President he had ridiculed in the spring of 1939.