Know your Enemy: The American Debate on Nazism, 1933-1945

by Michaela Hoenicke Moore

Overview

This book analyzes the intellectual side of the American war effort against Nazi Germany. It shows how conflicting interpretations of “the German problem” shaped American warfare and postwar planning. The story of how Americans understood National Socialism in the 1930s and 1940s provides a counter-example to the usual tale of enemy images. The level of German popular support for the Nazi regime, the nature of Nazi war aims, and the postwar prospects of German democratization stood at the center of public and governmental debates. American public perceptions of the Third Reich – based in part on ethnic identification with the Germans – were often forgiving but also ill-informed. This conflicted with the Roosevelt administration’s need to create a compelling enemy image. The tension between popular and expert views generated complex and fruitful discussions among America’s political and cultural elites and produced insightful, yet contradictory interpretations of Nazism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521829694
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	11/23/2009
Series:	Publications of the German Historical Institute
Pages:	410
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Michaela Hoenicke Moore is Professor of History at the University of Iowa. She has taught at the Kennedy Institute of the Free University in Berlin, at the University of North Carolina, and at York University in Toronto and worked as a Senior Fellow in US Foreign Policy at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin. She is the co-editor (with Bernard May) of The Uncertain Superpower: Domestic Dimensions of US Foreign Policy after the Cold War, and her articles have appeared in journals including Diplomatic History and Amerikastudien.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Thomas Wolfe and the Third Reich; Introduction: defining the German problem; Part I. Prelude to War: 1. Memories of World War One: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Germany; 2. News from the new Germany: conflicting interpretations, contested meaning, 1933–40; 3. The prospect of war, 1933–41; Part II. Mobilizing the American Home Front: 4. The principal battleground of this war is American opinion, 1941/42; 5. OWI: explaining Nazism to the American people is no easy assignment; 6. Why we fight: the nature of the enemy seen differently; Part III. The Public Debate on Germany, 1942–5: 7. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: Germans and Nazis; 8. The German disease and Nazism as gangsterism; 9. German peculiarities versus human universality: Vansittartism; Part IV. The Governmental Debate on Postwar Plans, 1942–5: 10. What do you do with people like that?; 11. How to prevent World War III; 12. The enemy in defeat: German-American encounters at zero hour; Conclusion.

Editorial Reviews

"This book provides the general and the scholarly interested reader with exceptionally important insights. First, the author tells us, on the basis of extensive primary source research, how and why the various American perceptions of Nazi Germany during the 1930s and during WWII tended to differentiate between Germans and Nazis. Second, that the Roosevelt administration itself was divided about its own war aims. Third, that this division allowed, in due course, a better, positive treatment of the postwar Germany than anticipated. And finally, that the legacy of pre-WWII appeasement, and of an alleged, coherent American crusade against Nazi totalitarian ambitions, which was hardly the case, became the root of American behavior during the Cold War all the way to our times. This work is highly recommended." - Shlomo Aronson, Hebrew University, Jerusalem

"This important book complements John Dower's classic account of American attitudes toward the Japanese in World War II, War Without Mercy. Exhaustively researched, Hoenicke Moore's study explains how cultural and racial affinities predisposed a broad swath of American opinion to cling to an ambivalent, forgiving view of the German enemy. Know Your Enemy helps explain why postwar Americans so quickly embraced the Germans as natural allies against 'semi-Asiatic,' Communist Russia." - Frank Costigliola, University of Connecticut

"An impressive study of American political and intellectual confusion about the nature of National Socialism, uncertainty about the complicity of the German people, and ambivalence about how to respond. Nazism as evil incarnate and World War II as the good war dominated American understanding after 1945, but as Hoenicke Moore provocatively argues, such moral clarity and political unanimity were lacking at the time." - Mary Nolan, New York University

"Know Your Enemy is a solidly researched book, which relies on both American diplomatic history as well as the history of Germany (both English and German scholarship)." -Heather L. Dichter, York College of Pennsylvania

"Know Your Enemy is an academic tour de force, equal in research to several doctoral dissertations. In a rich, clearly written, and perceptive study, Michaela Hoenicke Moore covers the variety of American opinions concerning the nature of Nazi Germany and the theories offered during World War II to prevent any rebirth of the Third Reich." -Justus Doenecke, Emeritus, New College of Florida

"...,Michaela Hoenicke Moore's Know Your Enemy is a path breaking work that demands the attention of all scholars of American foreign policy, and is a model of combining cultural analysis with more traditional approaches to the study of foreign policy. It rewards many times over a close reading..." -David Schmitz, Whitman College

"...a tour de force..." -J Simon Rofe, University of Leicester

"Know Your Enemy: The American Debate on Nazism performs an admirable service in tying together a wide range of disparate threads that show the changing nature of public awareness and challenges of understanding National Socialism, the broad range of insightful and valid arguments that helped shape the conduct of war and perception of its complexities, and the constructive manner in which they went on to inform postwar planning." -Timothy J. Holian, Journal of Transatlantic Studies

"Her impressively researched and nuanced book is well worth careful study." -Richard Breitman, American Historical Review

"Michaela Moore's excellent new study is a deeply researched, well-written, and analytically sharp intellectual history of how Americans struggled to understand the origins of, and the extent of the German people's responsibility for, Nazism in the years 1933-45." -Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, Central European History

"...an enormously impressive monograph, which not only fills a major hole in the historiography but also draws some insightful larger conclusions about US attitudes towards the enemy during periods of war." -Steven Casey, The International History Review

"...a veritable mine of information about an ongoing discourse in the US during the 1930s and 1940s regarding the treatment of Nazi Germany before, during and after World War II." -Jörg Thunecke, Newsletter of the International Feuchtwanger Society

From the Publisher