The Main Nazi Newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, Praised Roosevelt’s “New Deal” for Its Affinity with National Socialist Philosophy

The National Socialists hailed the emergency relief measures undertaken during Roosevelt’s first hundred days in office as fully consistent with their own revolutionary program. On May 11, 1933, the main Nazi newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, offered its commentary in an article with the headline “Roosevelt’s Dictatorial Recovery Measures.” The author wrote, “What has transpired in the United States since President Roosevelt’s inauguration is a clear signal of the start of a new era in the United States as well.” The tone on January 17, 1934, was much the same: “We, too, as German National Socialists are looking toward America. . . . Roosevelt is carrying out experiments and they are bold. We, too, fear only the possibility that they might fail.” And on June 21, 1934, the paper drew its initial conclusion about the success of the New Deal: “Roosevelt has achieved everything humanly possible in light of his narrow, insufficient basis.”

Just as National Socialism superseded the decadent “bureaucratic age” of the Weimar Republic, the Völkischer Beobachter opined, so the New Deal had replaced “the uninhibited frenzy of market speculation” of the American 1920s. The paper stressed “Roosevelt’s adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies,” praising the president’s style of leadership as being comparable to Hitler’s own dictatorial Führerprinzip. “If not always in the same words,” the paper wrote, “[Roosevelt], too, demands that collective good be put before individual self-interest. Many passages in his book Looking Forward could have been written by a National Socialist. In any case, one can assume that he feels considerable affinity with the National Socialist philosophy.” The newspaper admitted that Roosevelt maintained what it called “the fictional appearance of democracy,” but it also proclaimed that in the United States “the development toward an authoritarian state is under way.” The author added, “The president’s fundamental political course still contains democratic tendencies but is thoroughly inflected by a strong national socialism.”

—Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933-1939, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), e-book.