Kennedy dispatches

Kennedy dispatches are secret reports from German Ambassador Herbert von Dirksen in London, recording conversations with Joseph P. Kennedy, then the United States Ambassador to Great Britain. The extracts, received in Berlin in June and October 1938, show Kennedy describing American sympathy for aspects of German anti-Jewish policy and help expose the diplomatic language through which persecution could be acknowledged, relativized, and made less politically costly. Their later discovery by Xavier March places these reports among the documentary fragments that challenge the official history of the Nazi state.

Document and Provenance

The dispatches appear as a secret state document from the Reich Ministry for Foreign Affairs, attributed to von Dirksen and described as an account of conversations with Kennedy. The novel presents printed extracts, rather than a complete diplomatic file: the first is marked as received in Berlin on June 13, 1938, and the second on October 18 of that year. These headings establish the reports’ administrative route and dates while also defining their limits. The reader encounters selected records of what one ambassador reported about another, not an unmediated transcript of Kennedy’s conversations.

That documentary framing matters to the dispatches’ meaning. Von Dirksen’s account includes both Kennedy’s reported statements and the ambassador’s own assessment of Kennedy’s personality. The material therefore records a diplomatic exchange and the German official’s interpretation of it at once. Its form gives the remarks institutional weight, but the reported nature of the conversation remains visible: the documents are evidence of what the German embassy said Kennedy had conveyed, not proof that every phrase is a verbatim record.

The 1938 Conversations

In the June report, Kennedy is described as believing that Germany’s government had accomplished great things and that Germans were satisfied and enjoying good living conditions. The report then turns to the “Jewish question,” which it identifies as a matter of considerable importance to German-American relations. Kennedy is represented as distinguishing between Germany’s aim of getting rid of Jews and the public clamor accompanying that aim: in his reported view, the noisy presentation of the policy, rather than the policy itself, was what damaged relations with the United States.

The report gives Kennedy’s stated reason for understanding German policy as a comparison with his own country. He referred to Boston and said that Jews had not been admitted to one golf club and other clubs there for fifty years. The analogy does not make the policies identical; it reveals how Kennedy, as represented in the dispatch, used familiar American social exclusion to frame and soften his response to Germany’s persecution. The diplomatic record thus exposes not only the existence of anti-Semitic attitudes in the United States but the way such attitudes could be invoked to reduce criticism of a more systematic state policy.

The October extract returns to the same theme. Von Dirksen writes that Kennedy again referred to strong anti-Semitic tendencies in the United States and to a substantial portion of the American population that, in Kennedy’s view, understood Germany’s attitude toward Jews. The repetition gives the dispatches a cumulative force: the first report associates Kennedy’s position with American club exclusion, while the second presents his observations as a recurring feature of their conversations rather than an isolated remark.

The second extract also records von Dirksen’s personal conclusion that Kennedy, judged by his whole personality, would get on very well with Adolf Hitler. That sentence belongs to the ambassador’s assessment, not to a recorded statement by Kennedy. Its placement beside Kennedy’s reported remarks makes the dispatch more than a neutral account of diplomatic discussion: it documents how von Dirksen interpreted the common ground he perceived and anticipated the political compatibility that might follow.

Discovery and Evidentiary Role

The reports acquire renewed significance when March and Rudi Halder search archival material connected with Martin Luther. Among the papers March later examines are documents with imposing official letterheads, including records and correspondence from the Reich Chancellery, the Economics Ministry, and Organisation Todt. The Kennedy extracts belong to this larger body of recovered paperwork. Their presence beside records concerning the regime’s administration and policy connects international diplomacy to the investigation’s broader inquiry into what the state knew, recorded, and sought to control.

The dispatches do not, by themselves, establish the fate of the Jews or explain the machinery of the later mass killings. Their force is narrower and more precise: they preserve a 1938 account of a prominent American diplomat expressing understanding of German anti-Semitism and criticizing its publicity more than its purpose. Read against the subsequent evidence March uncovers, that early diplomatic language becomes an unsettling measure of how persecution could be discussed before its full consequences were admitted. The reports function as both records and objects in an investigation where paper carries testimony, but where the meaning of testimony depends on who produced it, what was preserved, and what other evidence surrounds it.