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Much has been written about US efforts to solve the 'German problem' after the Second World War. Scholars have carefully studied US attempts to de-Nazify, pacify and democratise post-war Germany and have identified the creation of large-scale student exchange programmes as an integral part of that agenda. As this article shows, 1945 was not the first time in the twentieth century that US policy-makers and educators had pondered the German problem and sought to address Germany's apparently deficient democratisation and excessive militarism, as well as the alarmingly narrow horizons of its youth. Based on long-neglected or inaccessible archival materials in Europe and the United States, this article charts the development of US student exchanges with inter-war Germany and demonstrates that a fuller understanding of US re-education policies in West Germany requires paying attention to the 1920s and 1930s. The article traces the discovery of the German student as an object of US democratisation efforts in the inter-war period and shows that US re-education policy after 1945 was deeply informed by the experiences made, connections forged and convictions won (sometimes without reliable evidence) by US internationalists in the inter-war years. Facing the German problem after the First World War, the article argues, helped establish a modus operandi —and a modus cogitandi —with regard to the German student that would inform US cultural diplomacy well into the Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]