Vansittartism
Influential minority position in American public discourse during World War II offering the most unabashedly negative view of the German enemy by defining Nazism as arising out of that country’s history and national character.
It took its name from Robert Gilbert Vansittart (1881-1957, a Lord beginning in 1941), a high-ranking British foreign policy adviser whose 1941 book, Black Record: Germans Past and Present, warned of a pattern of German aggression so deeply rooted in that country’s history as to make Hitler not an aberration but a logical outcome of it. A year after its publication the dispute over Lord Vansittart’s views also heated up in the United States, which had now officially joined the war against Nazi Germany. The term was used in a derogatory sense, primarily by opponents of this view who defined it by exaggerating it and wrongly likened it to the Nazi stereotyping of Jews. Stripped of its wartime polemics, Vansittartism emphasized several key facets: cultural and political conditioning toward authoritarianism and militarism, popular support for the Nazi regime, and the weakness of the German opposition.Four points characterized the Vansit- tartist position. First, its proponents rejected the notion of a dichotomy between Nazi leaders and an innocent German people who had become their first victim. Instead they found that the Nazis drew on much popular support for their foreign policy aims, racist views, and excessive nationalism. The lawyer Louis Nizer, whose What to Do with Germany (1944) was the American equivalent of the Black Record, postulated the primacy of pan-Germanism over the role of leaders: the current fuhrer only expressed deep-seated popular yearn
ings. The role that ordinary Germans played in the creation and maintenance of the Nazi regime thus lay at the core of the controversy over Vansittartism.
Second, Vansittartists voiced serious reservations about the notion of “the other Germany” or the “good Germans” whose existence was not denied but whose political relevance and efficacy was severely doubted. A third central characteristic was the postulation of intellectual, cultural, and political precursors to National Socialism in German history. Phenomena like militarism, authoritarianism, an ideology of national arrogance rooted in self-pity, discontent, and insecurity were oft-cited elements of continuity since the 1870s. Fourth and finally, Vansittartists turned Germany’s selfproclaimed, positively connoted anti-Western “special path” into an indictment: Germans had consciously left the path of civilization. The sum of these views stood in irreconcilable contrast to the notion that the Third Reich was an aberration in German history, that Nazism had no popular support, but had been imposed on an unwilling, sullen people.Vansittartism was a highly contested position in the American wartime debate. Opponents of this view (like Dorothy Thompson) misrepresented Vansittartist arguments until they turned into accusations of collective guilt, suggesting the image of an incorrigibly aggressive people. Vansittartists argued that German culture had produced the current regime and national behavior; their critics cited them as claiming that Germans were militaristic by nature. The equation “Hitler is Germany” became total, just as the continuity of certain strands in German history turned into the constancy of a national character in the critics’ rendition. But Vansittartism was decidedly not a racist or essentializing explanation, as these commentators stressed repeatedly that Germans as individuals were no different from other people. The Van- sittartist argument for the continuity in German aggression was a cultural-historical one, which could only be addressed through reeducation. However stern the postwar treatment for defeated Germany that the Vansittartists proposed, it was never “annihilation” or “enslavement” as their opponents implied.
In the United States the Vansittartist position was most effectively represented by the Society for the Prevention of World War III (SPWWIII). Headed by the crime novelist Rex Stout, the group included a number of well-known and outspoken public commentators such as Friedrich Tete Harens Tetens; the journalists Edgar A. Mowrer and Sigrid Schulz; the emigrants Emil Ludwig and Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster; and historians such as Walter Johnson, Allan Nevins, and Douglas S. Freeman. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had recommended Vansittart’s Black Record to his psychological warfare coordinator, Colonel William J. Donovan, shared in particular the Vansittartist notion that the German people were deeply implicated in the crimes of the Nazi regime and that the Third Reich itself had important antecedents in German history. Even though several members of the American wartime government held these views, they seldom aired them publicly, mindful of both popular sentiment against a national characterization of this enemy as well as the critics’ unfounded but effective claim that Vansit- tartism equaled Nazism in its racial stereotyping. During the public debate over the Morgenthau Plan in late 1944, members of the SPWWIII who also dominated the War Writers’ Board were among the few who publicly sided with the Department of the Treasury.
At the heart of the argument between Vansittartists and their critics was the question of German peculiarities versus human universality. How much of the Third Reich’s racist and militarist policies were peculiar to Germany and could be attributed to a specific national-cultural heritage? And what were the implications if this war and genocide were described as part of modern civilization, explained within a European historical context and understood with reference to the human capacity for evil? In the American wartime debate on Nazi Germany, Vansittartism quickly became a straw man argument, a commonly and polemically used slogan to denounce a view with which one does not agree, fraught with mistaken associations of racism, collective guilt, and annihilation.
Contrary to what the critics of Van- sittartism argued, those authors who held Germans to be inherently and irredeemably aggressive represented rare exceptions in American wartime thinking on the Third Reich. Instead, this wartime position that understood National Socialism within the larger context of German history, emphasizing continuity, comprised many features of what became known as the postwar historiographical paradigm of Germany’s “special path.”Michaela Hoenicke Moore
See also Morgenthau Plan; Thompson, Dorothy; U.S. Plans for Postwar Germany (1941-1945); World War II
References and Further Reading
Hoenicke Moore, Michaela. “Know Your Enemy”: American Responses to Nazism. New York: Cambridge University, 2005.
Nizer, Louis. What to Do with Germany. Chicago: Ziff Davis, 1944.
Reuther, Thomas. Die ambivalente Normalisierung. Deutschlanddiskurs und Deutschlandbilder in den USA, 1941—1955. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2000.
Spater, Jorg. Vansittart. Britische Debatten uber Deutsche und Nazis 1902—1945.
Gottingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2003.
Vansittart, Robert Gilbert. Black Record.
Germans Past and Present. London:
Hamish, 1941.