This article explores Weimar Germany's strategic use of German child distress to win US popular support for a revision of the Versailles treaty. Through the early 1920s German officials deliberately publicized the innocent suffering of German children to project German poverty and victimization and to communicate the unjust and untenable nature of the peace terms to the world, especially the powerful United States. At a time when the United States of America withdrew politically from Europe, its unprecedented humanitarian engagement overseas, including a German child-feeding program, seemed to offer a unique opportunity to mobilize empathy and support for the recent enemy among an otherwise hostile and uninterested US public. Though concerns over German international prestige were always prevalent, Germany’s restricted room of political manoeuvre repeatedly forced such strategic appeals to pity as the only option to garner US interest, sympathy and, ultimately, involvement in a revision of the peace terms, especially the reparations question. By focusing on this ‘diplomacy of pity’ the article sheds light on Weimar Germany's hopes and frustrations in engaging so important, and so elusive, a power as the United States of America in the early 1920s. The article’s focus on German ambitions with regard to US humanitarian aid also challenges the common notion of aid recipients as passive objects of foreign magnanimity. The way recipient nations construct and use their humanitarian narrative, the agency they assert, deserves much wider attention.