Letter partial envelope America/Germany William Edward Dodd (born October 21, 1869; died February 9, 1940) served as the United States Ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1937. On October 12, 1933, Dodd gave a speech to the American Chamber of Commerce in Berlin, with Joseph Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg in attendance, and used an elaborate analogy, based on Roman history, to criticize the Nazis as half-educated statesmen who adopted the arbitrary modes of an ancient tyrant. His views grew more critical and pessimistic with the Night of the Long Knives. He was one of the very few in the U.S. and European diplomatic community who reported that the Nazis were too strongly entrenched for any opposition to emerge. In May 1935 he reported to his State Department superiors that Hitler intended to annex part of the Corridor, part of Czechoslovakia, and all of Austria. A few months later he predicted a German-Italian alliance, but was largely ignored. He offered to resign, but President Roosevelt merely requested a sabbatical in the U.S. for his health. However, reacting later to complaints about Dodd's effectiveness as well as his health, Roosevelt notified the State Department in April 1937 that he was prepared to see Dodd's tenure end on September 1. Upon his arrival in the U.S in August, 1937, Dodd said that the basic objective of some powers in Europe is to frighten and even destroy democracies everywhere. This provoked a formal protest on the part of the German Ambassador to the U.S. Given that exchange, the State Department determined that it was more important that Dodd return to Germany than to allow his resignation to appear as a response to German protests. Dodd left a resignation letter before returning to Germany, and suggested the following March as a suitable date for his resignation. However, in September, his dispute with the State Department over U.S. diplomatic presence at the Nuremberg rallies became public. The German government told the State Department that Dodd could no longer function in Berlin. Dodd was surprised when told in November to prepare to depart by the end of the year. His resignation was announced in December. After a year's illness, Dodd died on February 9, 1940, at his country home at Round Hill, Loudoun County, Virginia.[ Photo retrieved from Corbis Images 8/9/2012.