William Dodd (ambassador)

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William Edward Dodd (1869- ? ) was a historian who served as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's ambassador to Nazi Germany from 1933-1938. He was born in Clayton, N. C., and educated at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and at the University of Leipzig.

As a student, he attended the University of Leipzig during the zenith of German liberalism. During the 1910s and 1920s, he was a professor of history at the University of Chicago.

He was a Jeffersonian democrat and Southern liberal. On October 5, 1933, Dodd gave a speech in Berlin in which he described the New Deal programs in the following way: "It was not revolution as men are prone to say. It was a popular expansion of governmental powers beyond all constitutional grants; and nearly all men everywhere hope the President may succeed."

As ambassador, Dodd tried to save the life of Helmut Hirsch, an German-American Jew who planned to bomb parts of the Nazi-Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg, but to no avail. Roosevelt had chosen him because of his liberal democratic principles.

In 1938, in a Commentary published in Harwöod Childs' translation of The Nazi Primer - Official Handbook for the Schooling of Hitler Youth, Ambassador Dodd wrote a chilling assessment of Nazi ideology and the Third Reich's plan for Europe. While some have argued that those outside of Germany were unaware of the persecution of Jews and others under the Nazi regime, Ambassador Dodd's commentary, written years before the liberation of the Nazi death camps, stated:

[S]everal policies were adopted during the first two years of the Nazi regime, The first was to suppress the Jews . . .. They were to hold no positions in University or government operations, own no land, write nothing for newspapers, gradually give up their personal business relations, be imprisoned and many of them killed. . . . [The Primer] betrays no indication of the propaganda activities of the Nazi government. And of course there is not a word in it to warn the unwary reader that all the people who might oppose the regime have been absolutely silenced. The central idea behind it is to make the rising generation worship their chief and get ready to 'save civilization' from the Jews, from Communism and from democracy -- thus preparing the way for a Nazified world where all freedom of the individual, of education, and of the churches is to be totally suppressed.

[edit] Writings

While successively holding the chairs of history at Randolph-Macon College (1900-1908) and the University of Chicago (1908- ), he wrote:

Jeffersons Rückkehr zur Politik, 1796 (1900)
Life of Nathaniel Mason (1903)
Life of Jefferson Davis (1907)
Statesmen of the Old South (1911)
Woodrow Wilson and his Work (1920)

In addition, he was editor and joint author of the Riverside History of the United States (1915) and of the Cotton Kingdom (in Chronicles of America series), and co-translator of Lamprecht's What Is History? (1905).

[edit] Family

His son William E. Dodd, Jr., daughter Martha Dodd, and her husband Alfred Stern, were allegedly Soviet advocates during World War II.

[edit] References

Childs, Harwood, Commentary by Dodd, William, The Nazi Primer translated from the original German- Fritz Brennecke, Vom Deutschen Volk und seinem Lebersraum – Handbuch für die Schulungsarbeit in der H.J. Harper & Brothers (1938)