Michaela Moore's excellent new study is a deeply researched, well-written, and analytically sharp intellectual history of how Americans struggled to understand the origins of, and the extent of the German people's responsibility for, Nazism in the years 1933–45. It explains how the American understanding of both had important consequences for U.S. policy toward occupied Germany. And it concludes with a provocative paradox—that the United States' success in reconstructing Germany after World War II was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Nazism, one that underestimated its ideological fanaticism as well as the German people's commitment to it. In showing how the Americans paradoxically ultimately got their policy right despite getting their history wrong, Moore's book provides new confirmation of Hegel's much-cited adage that the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.

One of the great virtues of Know Your Enemy is that it exposes the blind spots in present-day American memory of World War II. If today most Americans view the conflict as a black and white battle of Allied good against Axis “evil,” Moore shows how Americans at the time of the war itself were unable to agree on what the fight against Germany was actually about. There was no single American view of Nazism and the Germans, but rather a multiplicity of competing perspectives that jostled constantly with one another for domestic dominance. In contrast to the American view of the Japanese, which was far more monolithic and saturated with undeniable racism, the American view of the Germans was far more nuanced.

Many reasons account for this fact, but an important one was that most Americans had an overwhelmingly positive image of Germany and the German people in the years prior to the Nazi takeover. Favorable attitudes toward German immigrants dating back to the nineteenth century and interwar revisionist histories that exonerated the Kaiserreich for starting World War I prevented many Americans from being too critical of the Nazi dictatorship after its establishment in 1933. Opinions thus diverged sharply in the years before World War II about how deeply Nazism was rooted in German political, social, and cultural traditions. This de facto debate about the Sonderweg pitted many groups and historical explanations against one another. For example, American journalists based in Europe, such as William Shirer and Edgar Ansel Mowrer, were fiercely anti-Nazi, saw Hitler's dictatorship as having deep German roots, and tended toward an interventionist foreign policy, while the domestic American media, led by Time Magazine and the Saturday Evening Post, saw the Nazi regime as just another pragmatic great power that was best handled from an isolationist stance of nonconfrontation. Yet, even among journalists based in Germany there were disagreements, with the otherwise anti-Nazi writer Dorothy Thompson insisting on the existence of the “other Germany” and believing that fascism was not an exclusively German phenomenon.

There were further disagreements within the American political establishment and American society. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) leaned toward a Sonderweg explanation of Nazism, partly because of his childhood encounters with German militarism (he briefly attended school in Germany in 1891). Yet, Roosevelt had to keep his suspicions of the German people somewhat to himself, as public opinion polls during the war repeatedly showed that a majority of Americans continued to differentiate between the German citizenry and the Nazi leadership (only five percent of Americans in 1942 believed that the U.S. was at war with the German people; sixty-two percent said they did not hate them; and sixty-seven percent in 1943 believed Germany could be easily reintegrated into the postwar order—as opposed to eight percent who believed the same about Japan). Beyond disagreements with the American people, FDR faced opposition from the War and State Departments about how to diagnose the source of, and devise a solution for, the “German problem.” In 1944, the leaders of both departments believed that Nazism derived from contingent factors, such as the unjust Versailles settlement, and did not have deep roots in German culture. They further believed in the Germans' capacity to embrace democracy and thus called for “winning German hearts” through a mild occupation policy rooted in reconstruction (which unsurprisingly served the departments' respective agendas of facilitating military occupation and economic revival).

It is a truism by now that this reconstructionist approach ultimately succeeded in paving the way for Germany's ultimate rehabilitation and democratization. Yet Moore admirably strives to rescue the reputation of the losers in the debate over how to treat postwar Germany. The losing camp included the proponents of a “hard” peace, such as FDR's Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, and the lobbying organization, the Society for the Prevention of World War III. They and others like them sympathized with Germany's victims, especially the Jews, and were committed to achieving justice for the crimes perpetrated against them by the Nazi leadership and its German supporters. The hard peace camp was convinced that the Germans needed to realize they had lost the war (something they had not realized after 1918) by imposing a harsh peace upon the country, defined by policies of territorial partition and deindustrialization. Moore makes clear that the “Morgenthau Plan” was hardly the notorious expression of “revenge” that its detractors have long made it out to be and shows that it was not outside the mainstream of views within the U.S. government. Moreover, she shows how domestic American opposition to the plan was tinged with anti-Semitism (it was seen as expressive of a Jewish drive for vengeance and antithetical to Christian “charity”).

Most importantly, she shows that, however successful it may have been, the mild American policy of reconstruction “came at the cost of a general popular recognition of the true nature of the Nazi regime and the deep complicity of German society in the regime's crimes” (p. 346). Given Moore's assertion that “recent scholarship … corroborates the picture of a broadly nazified society that was not easily able to shed its authoritarian ways” after 1945, it would be interesting to know whether she thinks the success of the postwar Federal Republic occurred despite, or because of, American ignorance of the nation's true political leanings. Might history have turned out differently, with a more satisfying moral outcome, had the hard peace camp won the day and held the German people accountable for their complicity in the Nazis' crimes? By the same token, were there not major risks in the reconstructionist camp's mild approach that could have ended in catastrophe (for example, a Nazi revival and World War III, as the Society for the Prevention of World War III continued to warn about well into the 1950s)? Such all-too-historical questions are impossible to answer with any certainty. Yet, they deserve to be kept in mind, for they help us resist Whiggish views of Germany's postwar success and remind us of its moral price tag.

In the end, readers of Know Your Enemy may remain uncertain whether it ultimately mattered that American policy makers never really “knew” the German enemy. Yet the book provides a great service by prompting us to think more deeply about where history ultimately stands in the spectrum between utility and liability.