He attended the congress of the Nazi Party in Nuremberg in September 1938 and broke with the precedent established by his predecessor, William E. Dodd, who had refused to attend. In Dodd's absence, the embassy's chargé d'affaires had attended the previous year. President Roosevelt called Wilson home for urgent consultations in November 1938 following the anti-Jewish attacks of Kristallnacht and he never returned to Germany.