SOURCE: "Die Amerikaner," in The New York Times Book Review, February 4, 1968, pp. 10, 12.

In the following review, Loewenheim states that Friedländer's Prelude to Downfall, though its arguments are not original, adequately presents Hitler's perceptions of and policies toward the United States before its entry into the Second World War.

It seems clear that many Americans—and especially critics of United States policy in Vietnam—would prefer to hear as little as possible about the history and meaning of American foreign policy in the 1930's. This may help to account for the disturbing fact that neither William L. Langer's and S. Everett Gleason's The Challenge to Isolation; The World Crisis of 1937–1940 (1952) and The Undeclared War, 1940–1941 (1953), one of the great works of modern scholarship, nor the impressive chapters on international affairs in James MacGregor Burns's Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (1956) and William E. Leuchtenburg's Franklin D. Roosevelt and the...