One measure of the “ruthlessness” of the New Dealers’ war was FDR’s perverse refusal to assist Germans who sought to overthrow Hitler — and his utterly demonic insistence upon Germany’s “unconditional surrender.” Fleming describes a November 1941 meeting in Berlin between liberal American journalist Louis Lochner and 15 members of the Front der anstandiger Leute (“Front of Decent People”). Drawn from the Reichstag, the German military, the secret police, and the clergy, the Front “hoped to overthrow Hitler, renounce his conquests and his war on the Jews, and restore Germany as a peaceful member of the family of nations.”

Hitler’s German enemies were even willing to listen to American advice as to a suitable post-Hitler German government. However, before Lochner — who knew FDR well — could convey the Front’s message to Roosevelt, Pearl Harbor was attacked, with FDR’s connivance. Four days later, Hitler declared war on America, prompted by the December 6th leak of “Rainbow Five,” a classified American plan for war against Germany. (Fleming makes a persuasive case that FDR arranged for the leak for the specific purpose of provoking Hitler to declare war.)

Throughout the war, the Front — often acting through Wilhelm Canaris, head of the German Secret Service — sought to make contact with the American government, but was repeatedly rebuffed. A group of German anti-Nazi scholars, many of them Jewish refugees, employed by the Office of Strategic Studies (the forerunner to the CIA) “urged the Allied governments to make contact with the resisters to ‘give some substance to the hope,’” recalls Fleming. “Their advice was totally ignored.” When Lochner tried to file an AP report from Europe about the Front in 1944, the story was killed by Army censors. “He was told a special regulation was in force ‘From the President of the United States in his capacity as commander in chief, forbidding all mention of any German resistance.’”