During the same trip, Eleanor and he were riding by train through the German countryside when a German passenger brusquely reached across him to shut the window without asking. Eleanor wrote her new mother-in-law that she “thought Franklin would burst and a duel would ensue.”
During World War II, while waging war against Hitler, Roosevelt told friends and family colorful stories – possibly exaggerated or imaginary – about his youthful brushes with German authoritarianism. He claimed that while pedaling with his tutor through southern Germany, he had been arrested four times in a single day.
In another tale, perhaps an embellishment of his honeymoon encounter with the rude German on the train, he claimed that while traveling with his mother and a friend of hers to Berlin, a “Prussian officer” had once closed the train window. Since his mother’s friend had a “bad headache,” Roosevelt reopened it. According to him, the Prussian twice again closed it. As Roosevelt claimed, he knocked the Prussian to the floor, for which he was thrown into a Berlin jail: “My mother called the American embassy, but it took them several hours to get me out of prison.”
Author’s Note:
[The four times in a day that Roosevelt was arrested were allegedly for…] swiping cherries, rolling over a goose, taking his bicycle into a train station and riding his bicycle into a German village after the sun had gone down.
Source:
Beschloss, Michael R. “Unconditional Surrender.” The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman, and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2007. 10. Print.
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