Hitler's ambivalent attaché : Lt. Gen. Friedrich von Boetticher in America, 1933-1941

341 Pages·2005·3.401 MB·English

by  Alfred M Beck

Hitler’s
Ambivalent Attaché
Also by Alfred M. Beck
The Corps of Engineers:
The War against Germany(coauthor)
With Courage: The U.S. Army Air Forces
in World War II(general editor)
Hitler’s
Ambivalent Attaché
Lt. Gen. Friedrich von Boetticher in America,
1933–1941
ALFRED M. BECK
POTOMAC BOOKS, INC.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Copyright © 2005 by Potomac Books, Inc.
Published in the United States by Potomac Books, Inc. All rights reserved. No part
of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written per-
mission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in crit-
ical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beck, Alfred M., 1939-
Hitler’s ambivalent attaché : Lt. Gen. Friedrich von Boetticher in America,
1933–1941 / Alfred M. Beck.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-57488-877-3 (alk. paper)
1. Boetticher, Friedrich von, 1881-1967. 2. Diplomats—Germany—Biography.
3. Germany—Foreign relations—1933-1945. 4. United States—Foreign relations—
Germany. I. Title.
DD247.B623B43 2005
940.54—dc22
2004013425
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper that
meets the American National Standards Institute Z39-48 Standard.
Potomac Books, Inc.
22841 Quicksilver Drive
Dulles, Virginia 20166
First Edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For
Nelle, Ellen, Audrey, and Caroline,
Just because . . .

Contents
Preface ix
1 The Kaiser’s Soldier Endures 1
2 Soldier, Scholar, Diplomat, Spy 23
3 AMissionary in America 51
4 Evaluating the American Army 72
5 Distant Thunder 98
6 AConfusion of Aims 137
7 Time Runs Out 160
8 Yet Again Vanquished 191
9 “Who Knows . . . ?” 216
Notes 233
Selected Bibliography 292
Index 312
About the Author 323
vii

Preface
Lt. Gen. Friedrich von Boetticher was Germany’s only military
attaché in the United States between the two world wars. He was
his country’s sanctioned military observer in the capital of the na-
tion whose contributions of fresh troops had swung the balance
against Germany in the last year of World War I. The United States
was a strategic cipher whose potential as an ally of those powers ar-
rayed against Germany in the late 1930s might have given the
National Socialist government some pause in any predatory plans
for its neighbors. What Adolf Hitler may have learned of American
national preparedness in diplomatic pouch and cable traffic from
Washington at the time is of compelling interest. How much the
German dictator read or heeded the news is a question of equal sig-
nificance. This book attempts to answer those questions.
In its earliest form, this study had the narrower purpose of eval-
uating the content and accuracy of assessments of the American
Army that von Boetticher wrote during his eight years in Washing-
ton. That research produced some new observations on the man
and his tenure in Washington and rehearsed the anti-Semitic refer-
ences that peppered the diplomatic and attaché dispatches of the
time. The attaché’s reports and cables that contained this sort of
phraseology and any assessment dismissive of American industrial
potential particularly attracted the attention of editors of published
documentary records collections of German diplomatic dealings in
the 1930s. Such indispensable standard sources as the Documents on
German Foreign Policy, published in two long-running series under
U.S. State Department auspices between 1949 and 1983 [eventually
ix