Hitler's Ambivalent Attaché: Lt. Gen. Friedrich von Boetticher in America, 1933-1941 (review)

When Friedrich von Boetticher arrived in New York harbor on 14 April 1933, to assume his office as German military attaché in the United States, he was greeted not only by the local press but also by some members of the New York branch of the Stahlhelm. At the pier, the representatives of the German veterans' organization displayed two banners. One of them bore the American flag, the other one showed the swastika. This episode is telling of von Boetticher's time in the United States insofar as "the presence of the swastika itself," as Alfred M. Beck writes in his thoroughly researched and well-written book, "opened the question of how German representation in America was to proceed under the new political auspices of home" (p. 52).

Von Boetticher had already spent thirty-three years in the army before he came to the New World. Born on 14 October 1881, in a small town near Dresden, he was the son of a physician and amateur historian father and an American-born mother who had been raised in Britain. After having received a classical education at a Gymnasium in Bautzen, he joined the 28th Saxon Field Artillery Regiment at Pirna in 1900. Ten years later, von Boetticher was accepted at the Prussian Kriegsakademie in Berlin. His first posting was to the Railway Directorate of the Great General Staff. After World War I, he became chief of T-3, the German army intelligence unit and, in 1929, head of the German Army's Artillery School at Jüterbog.

As Nazi Germany's military attaché to the United States, von Boetticher was very successful in establishing good relations with members of the American military establishment. So close was von Boetticher to some U. S. generals that he even turned over secret operational material to them. Convinced of an "identity between the United States and Germany," he saw himself as a missionary and "as the bridge between the two" (p. 71). In a striking contrast to his predecessors, von Boetticher refrained from promoting his cause by covert means. "His chosen method of influencing what opinion he could was entirely inconsistent with the risks of clandestine intelligence and espionage" (p. 70).

Beck makes perfectly clear from the outset that von Boetticher was a "secondary figure" (p. x) and at no point in the book does he give in to the temptation to overestimate the influence of his subject. Von Boetticher was important, however, in contributing to the German perception of U.S. military strength and preparedness. He wrote home hundreds of reports on almost "everything from aerial signal flares and cavalry horses being readied for the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games to national defense strategy and industrial mobilization plans" (p. 72). These reports were also often full of anti-Semitic remarks and allusions.

While von Boetticher recognized the vast military potential of the United States, he frequently reported to Berlin that American aid to the Allies would not and could not be a decisive factor in the European theatre before mid-1941. With this constant reminder as to the probable limits of U.S. intervention, he might even have influenced "timetables in Berlin" (p. 150). In sum, Beck's book can be read not only as a thoughtful political biography of Nazi Germany's military attaché in the United States, it also skillfully illuminates the major issues of military history in the interwar period.