Adolf Hitler

Before formally entering World War II, FDR came up with a few key strategies to provide critical aid to allies in Europe in the fight against Hitler's Nazi ...

As part of the debates in Congress, some Senators wanted to explicitly block the Soviet Union from receiving any Lend-Lease aid, but Kimball says that FDR’s supporters “presciently” struck that language. Congress passed the first Neutrality Act in 1935, barring the export of “arms, ammunition, and implements of war” to any foreign nation at war. “Some Americans were ‘traumatized,’ if you will, by the fact that our World War I allies had borrowed a lot of money from the U.S. to buy weapons and food, and never paid it back,” says Kimball. “And they also wanted to avoid the problem of American ships carrying war materials across the ocean. In what’s known as the “ destroyers-for-bases deal,” FDR traded the World Ware I-era destroyers in exchange for 99-year leases on some British bases in the Western Hemisphere. Under the Neutrality Acts, for example, war planes could not be flown out of the United States for sale to foreign governments. You might not get the hose back, but at least your house didn’t burn down, too. American politicians didn’t want a repeat of what had happened in World War I. In a press conference, FDR compared it to lending a hose to a neighbor whose house is on fire. Britain was now fighting Germany essentially on its own, and it seemed very possible that Adolf Hitler would win. That required money, munitions and equipment—foreign aid that was explicitly banned by the Neutrality Acts. By the mid-1930s, the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party in Germany threatened to engulf Europe into another world war. So the FDR administration quietly came up with a solution.