Opinion on Friedrich von Boetticher the man and the attache differs widely in the memoir and historical literature on the diplomacy and intelligence operations of the period. Older German Foreign Office hands, especially those connected with the resistance to Nazism, would agree with the recollection of von Boetticher as a "dangerously stupid official" found in the statement of former Ambassador Dr. Karl Ritter, economic specialist on assignment to the German Foreign Office, New York Times, November 7, 1947, quoted in Gordon A. Craig, From Bismarck to Adenauer; Aspects of German Statecraft, Torchbook ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 94. This sentiment found echo in numerous references to von Boetticher in postwar research on German policy, intelligence, and espionage, most notably in Gerhard L. Weinberg's "Hitler's Image of the United States," American Historical Review 69 (July 1964): 1006-1021, and Joachim Remak's "Hitlers Amerikapolitik," Aussenpolitik 6 (November 1955): 711. Yet another student of German-American relations in 1940 and 1941 has devoted a whole chapter to "General von Boetticher's America" in which he employed the general's eminently quotable cables to allow the man to at once reveal and condemn himself. (See James Compton, The Swastika and the Eagle; Hitler, the United States, and the Origins of World War II [London: The Bodley Head, 1968], chapter 7, passim). Ladislas Farago, an American publicist, himself a veteran of the American naval intelligence service of World War II, dismissed the German attache as an "amiable extrovert with easy drawing room manners," but really a "pompous ass" who consorted with a disgruntled isolationist clique in the prewar American army. See his The Game of the Foxes (New York: Bantam Books, 1973), p. 607. Andreas Hillgruber, a German historian of Hitler's strategic ideas, isolates what he calls a strong optimism in von Boetticher's later "colored" reporting from America but does not seek its cause in his Hitlers Strategie; Politik und Kriegfuhrung, 1940-1941 (Frankfurt am Main: Bernhard und Graefe Verlag fur Wehrwesen, 1965), p. 196. Von Boetticher also found his defenders and admirers fewer in number. Chief among them are military professionals, German and American. One veteran German staff officer of World War II, Siegfried Westphal, recalled in 1975 that von Boetticher "was a declared opponent of Hitler long before 1933" in his Erin-nerungen (Mainz: Von Hase und Kohler Verlag, 1975), p. 383. Percy Schramm, the Gottingen University historian who kept the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (High Command) War Diaries during the war, had only the highest praise for the former attache in a volume entitled Hitler als militdrischer Fuhrer, 2d. rev. ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Atheneum Verlag, 1965), p. 185. So, incidentally, did the chief of staff of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, who rates von Boetticher as a "scharfsinniger Kopf" in an official military evaluation (von Boetticher Summary Personnel File; copy in author's possession). Almost every American who knew von Boetticher favored him as a gentleman and as a man of high culture and military competence. In a variety of interviews and exchanges of correspondence that developed detail not uncritical of von Boetticher, most of his American contemporaries viewed him, as did Hanson Baldwin, "with respect." This evaluation was contained in a letter from Baldwin (former military correspondent of the New York Times) to the author, August 7, 1973; General George S. Patton, Jr.'s daughter, Ruth Ellen Totten, also wrote to the author in a similar vein on March 16, 1973. And last, the best interpreter of military attaches as a genre and no defender of things military, Alfred Vagts has also noted that Hitler lavishly praised von Boetticher's reports, but misinterpreted them. (See Vagts, The Military Attache [Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1967], p. 60.) Alone among those commenting on von Boetticher's often fractious cables, Vagts voices this generalization but does not elaborate on how or why Hitler misread the reports or in what detail he actually read them at all. So disparate a summary of opinion on the man awakens the suspicion that his story is more complex than thus far revealed.
World History
