What Trump Learned from FDR & Hitler

A belligerent dictator building up his military arsenal. Nearby countries watching nervously. Free World leaders desperately offering concessions to appease him. That description applied to Adolf Hitler in the 1930s and, until very recently, to the mullahs of Iran.

We all know how the first story ended—in World War II and the Holocaust. The second story was hurtling towards a similar catastrophe, but the U.S. air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities have changed all that—and demonstrated that our nation’s leaders have learned a crucial lesson from history.

The Treaty of Versailles, signed by world leaders following World War I, required the complete disarmament of Germany. But when Hitler came to power in 1933, he thumbed his nose at the international community and vowed to remilitarize. The Nazi regime introduced conscription, resurrected the air force, and ordered Germany’s industries to undertake mass weapons manufacturing. Neither the United States nor its allies interfered.

Numerous American corporations assisted the German rearmament effort. General Motors and Ford sold military vehicles to Hitler. IBM provided tabulation machines. Standard Oil of New Jersey and DuPont supplied technology for producing synthetic rubber, which would be crucial to the German war machine. The Roosevelt administration did not prevent those companies from helping Hitler.

It’s not that FDR failed to recognize the threat Hitler posed to the Free World. At a 1934 press conference, he shared an anecdote that vividly illustrated the Nazi menace. “The school children in Germany are now going through an educational process,” the president said. He then recalled what he had been told by an American professor who recently visited friends in Germany.

The professor had overheard her hosts’ eight year-old son saying his nightly prayers. “He kneeled down at his mother’s knee and said his prayers and ended in good German, like a good German boy, and he said, ‘Dear God, please permit it that I shall die with a French bullet in my heart’,” FDR told the reporters. “That is what has got the French scared when ninety percent of the German people are thinking and talking that way. If I were a Frenchman, I would be scared too.”

After concluding the anecdote, Roosevelt emphasized that what he had just described was strictly off the record and could not be quoted. He did not want to risk offending Hitler. That fear also explained why, in hundreds of press conferences between 1933 and 1938, FDR never once criticized Hitler’s brutal persecution of German Jews.

Regardless of what President Roosevelt privately thought about Hitler, he was determined to maintain cordial—sometimes friendly—relations with the Nazi regime in the 1930s. That even extended to trying to sell helium to Nazi Germany, despite the danger that Hitler would use it for military purposes.

This happened in late 1937. Roosevelt told Congress that providing helium to Germany to power its Zeppelin airships would demonstrate to Hitler that the U.S. was “a good neighbor.” Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes opposed the proposal, arguing that it would be dangerous to provide the Nazis with a gas that was “of military importance.” The sale could not proceed without the interior secretary’s approval.

So FDR suggested to Ickes, during a cabinet meeting, that he could alleviate Ickes of responsibility by giving him a letter stating it was his “judgment, as Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, that this helium was not of military importance.”

The debate dragged on through mid-1938, at which point politics intervened. With congressional midterm elections looming in November, a  senior presidential adviser, Thomas Corcoran, confided to Secretary Ickes that (according to Ickes’s diary) the president had decided to drop the issue, because “if we now ship helium to Germany, it would offend the Jewish vote.” In retrospect, Roosevelt’s concern about the Democrats losing Jewish votes may seem puzzling, since the overwhelming majority of American Jews consistently voted for Democratic candidates. But it has happened more than once that fear of the Jewish vote was more significant than actual Jewish voting patterns.

The president never wavered from his pre-war preference for appeasing Nazi Germany. He compelled Secretary Ickes to delete criticism of Hitler from several of his speeches. Roosevelt also supported the Munich agreement to dismember Czechoslovakia. And FDR’s Commerce Department even quietly advised the Nazi regime on how to deceptively label their exports in order to evade anti-Nazi boycotters. Needless to say, none of those policies helped stave off war.

Fortunately, President Trump appears to have learned from his predecessor’s mistake. Appeasing belligerent foreign dictators, and allowing them to develop dangerous weapons, is not the path to peace.

Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. His book The Road to October 7: Hamas, the Holocaust, and the Eternal War Against the Jews will be published on October 1, 2025, by The Jewish Publication Society / University of Nebraska Press.