William Dodd (ambassador) - Assessments

Assessments

Assessments of Dodd's service in Berlin vary considerably, colored by what another ambassador might have accomplished. Hull in his Memoirs described Dodd as "sincere though impulsive and inexperienced." Dodd felt himself a failure both during his ambassadorship and after, having set himself the impossible standard of "changing the Third Reich by example and persuasion." Historian Gerhard Weinberg believes no other ambassador to Nazi Germany was more effective, "even if some were more popular and others better informed." He reports the assessment of George S. Messersmith, the embassy's consul general who worked closely with Dodd, who wrote that "there were very few men who realized what was happening in Germany more thoroughly " than Dodd, who proved ineffective because he "was completely appalled by what was happening." Historian Franklin L. Ford faults Dodd for failing to provide "concrete intelligence concerning immediate Nazi objectives and power" as his peers were providing their superiors in London and Paris. He faults as well Dodd's nostalgic view of the Germany of his student years and centuries past that enabled him to view German anti-Semitism as a Nazi phenomenon driven personally by Hitler without recognizing its deeper roots in German society. A harsh critic of FDR's foreign policy called Dodd "a tragic misfit", "a babe-in-the-woods in the dark forests of Berlin."