"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