by Ian Kershaw
Around 1p.m., just as Hitler was reaching the high-point of his peroration, German troops approached the Hohenzollern Bridge in Cologne.324 Two plane-loads of journalists, hand-picked by Goebbels, were there to record the historic moment.325 Word had quickly got round Cologne that morning. Thousands packed the banks of the Rhine and thronged the streets near the bridge. The soldiers received a delirious reception as they crossed. Women strewed the way with flowers. Catholic priests blessed them. Cardinal Schulte offered praise to Hitler for ‘sending back our army’.326 The ‘Church struggle’ was temporarily forgotten.
The force to be sent into the demilitarized zone numbered no more than 30,000 regulars, augmented by units of the Landespolizei. A mere 3,000 men were to penetrate deep into the zone. The remainder had taken up positions for the most part behind the eastern bank of the Rhine. The forward troops were to be prepared to withdraw within an hour in the event of likely military confrontation with the French.327 There was no chance of this. As we have seen, it had been ruled out in advance by French military leaders. French intelligence – counting SA, SS, and other Nazi formations as soldiers – had come up with an extraordinary figure of 295,000 for the German military force in the Rhineland.328 In reality, one French division would have sufficed to terminate Hitler’s adventure. ‘Had the French then marched into the Rhineland,’ Hitler was reported to have commented more than once at a later date, ‘we would have had to withdraw again with our tails between our legs (mit Schimpf und Schande). The military force at our disposal would not have sufficed even for limited resistance.’ The forty-eight hours following the entry of the German troops into the Rhineland were, he claimed, the most tense of his life.329 He was speaking, as usual, for effect. Hans Frank recorded similar comments. ‘If the French had really been serious, it would have become the greatest political defeat for me,’ he recalled Hitler declaring.330 But as the Dictator had correctly predicted, in fact, neither the French nor the British had the will for a fight. Already by the early evening of 7 March, it was plain that the coup had been a complete success. ‘With the Führer,’ noted Goebbels. ‘Comments from abroad excellent. France wants to involve (befassen) the League of Nations. That’s fine. So it [France] won’t take action. That’s the main thing. Nothing else matters… The reaction in the world was predicted. The Führer is immensely happy… The entry has gone according to plan… The Führer beams. England remains passive. France won’t act alone. Italy is disappointed and America uninterested. We have sovereignty again over our own land.’331
The risk had, in fact, been only a moderate one. The western democracies had lacked both the will and the unity needed to make intervention likely. But the triumph for Hitler was priceless. Not only had he outwitted the major powers, which had again shown themselves incapable of adjusting to a style of power-politics that did not play by the rules of conventional diplomacy. He had scored a further victory over the conservative forces at home in the military and the Foreign Office. As in March 1935 the caution and timidity in the armed forces’ leadership and among the career diplomats had proved misplaced. The Rhineland was the biggest reward yet for boldness. There had been no opposition from the military or Foreign Office. Remilitarization of the Rhineland was wanted by all. Objections had been no more than expressions of anxiety about timing and method. From Hitler’s point of view, it was simply another case of ‘cold feet’. His contempt for the ‘professionals’ in the army and Foreign Office deepened. His boundless egomania gained another massive boost.
This was not diminished by alarmist warnings of imminent danger of war from Leopold von Hoesch, German ambassador in London, a few days later, and Blomberg’s loss of nerve.332 By then, Hitler could afford to sweep aside such alarmism. Condemnation by the League of Nations on 19 March was also an irrelevance.333 Locarno had been destroyed; Versailles was in tatters. The crisis was long past. ‘Am I happy, my God am I happy that it has gone so smoothly!’ Hitler remarked to Hans Frank as they sat in his special train, passing through the Ruhr, looking out on the furnaces of the steel mills lighting up the night sky, on the way back to Berlin from his triumphant visit to Cologne at the end of the month.334
VI
The popular euphoria at the news of the reoccupation of the Rhineland far outstripped even the feelings of national celebration in 1933 or 1935 following previous triumphs. People were beside themselves with delight. The initial widespread fear that Hitler’s action would bring war was rapidly dissipated.335 It was almost impossible not to be caught up in the infectious mood of joy. It extended far beyond firm Nazi supporters. Opposition groups were demoralized.336 New admiration for Hitler, support for his defiance of the west, attack on Versailles, restoration of sovereignty over German territory, and promises of peace were – sometimes grudgingly – recorded by Sopade observers.337 The Hamburg middle-class housewife Luise Solmitz, a conservative nationalist enthusiast dismayed in 1935 to find her husband, a former officer of part-Jewish descent, and their daughter rejected as German citizens under the Nuremberg Laws, did not conceal her praise for Hitler. ‘I was totally overwhelmed by the events of this hour… overjoyed at the entry march of our soldiers, at the greatness of Hitler and the power of his speech, the force of this man.’ A few years earlier, ‘when demoralization (Zersetzung) ruled amongst us,’ she wrote, ‘we would not have dared contemplate such deeds. Again and again the Führer faces the world with a fait accompli. Along with the world, the individual holds his breath. Where is Hitler heading, what will be the end, the climax of this speech, what boldness, what surprise will there be? And then it comes, blow on blow, action as stated without fear of his own courage. That is so strengthening… That is the deep, unfathomable secret of the Führer’s nature… And he is always lucky.’338
The ‘election’ campaign that followed the Rhineland spectacular – new elections had been set for 29 March – was no more than a triumphant procession for Hitler. Ecstatic, adoring crowds greeted him on his passage through Germany. Goebbels outdid himself in the saturation coverage of his propaganda – carried into the most outlying villages by armies of activists trumpeting the Führer’s great deeds. ‘The Dictator lets himself be bound by the people to the policy that he wanted,’ summed up one Sopade agent.339 The ‘election’ result – 98.9 per cent ‘for the List and therefore for the Führer’ – gave Hitler what he wanted: the overwhelming majority of the German people united behind him, massive popular support for his position at home and abroad.340 Though the official figures owed something to electoral ‘irregularities’, and a good deal more to fear and intimidation, the overwhelming backing for Hitler – his enormous popularity now further bolstered by the Rhineland coup – could not be gainsaid.341 The problems and concerns, the grumbles and complaints, of the long preceding autumn and winter had suddenly – if only fleetingly – evaporated.
The Rhineland triumph left a significant mark on Hitler. The change that Dietrich, Wiedemann and others saw in him dated from around this time. From now on he was more than ever a believer in his own infallibility. Pseudo-religious symbolism came to infuse his rhetoric. A few months later, at the Nuremberg Tarty Rally of Honour’, messianic allusions from the New Testament would abound in his address to party functionaries: ‘How deeply we feel once more in this hour the miracle that has brought us together! Once you heard the voice of a man, and it spoke to your hearts; it awakened you, and you followed that voice… Now that we meet here, we are all filled with the wonder of this gathering. Not every one of you can see me and I do not see each one of you. But I feel you, and you feel me! It is faith in our nation that has made us little people great… You come out of the little world of your daily struggle for life, and of your struggle for Germany and for our nation, to experience this feeling for once: Now we are together, we are with him and he is with us, and now we are Germany!’342 Two days later, still in messianic mode, he saw a mystical fate uniting him and the German people: ‘That you have found me… among so many millions is the miracle of our time!
And that I have found you, that is Germany’s fortune!’343
A sense of his own greatness had been instilled in Hitler by his admirers since the early 1920s. He had readily embraced the aura attached to him. It had offered insatiable nourishment for his already incipient all-consuming egomania. Since then, the internal, and above all the foreign-policy successes, since 1933, accredited by growing millions to the Führer’s genius, had immensely magnified the tendency. Hitler swallowed the boundless adulation. He became the foremost believer in his own Führer cult. Hubris – that overweening arrogance which courts disaster – was inevitable. The point where nemesis takes over had been reached by 1936.
Germany had been conquered. It was not enough. Expansion beckoned. World peace would soon be threatened. Everything was coming about as he alone had foreseen it, thought Hitler. He had come to regard himself as ordained by Providence. ‘I go with the certainty of a sleepwalker along the path laid out for me by Providence,’ he told a huge gathering in Munich on 14 March.344 His mastery over all other power-groups within the regime was by now well-nigh complete, his position unassailable, his popularity immense. Few at this point had the foresight to realize that the path laid out by Providence led into the abyss.
1. Adolf Hitler (top row, centre) in his Leonding school photo, 1899
2. Klara Hitler, the mother of Adolf
3. Alois Hitler, Adolf’s father
4. Karl Lueger, Bürgermeister of Vienna, admired by Hitler for his antisemitic agitation
5. August Kubizek, Hitler’s boyhood friend in Linz and Vienna
6. The crowd in Odeonsplatz, Munich, greeting the proclamation of war, 2 August 1914. Hitler circled.
7. Hitler (right) with fellow dispatch messengers Ernst Schmidt and Anton Bachmann and his dog ‘Foxl’ at Fournes, April 1915
8. German soldiers in a trench on the Western Front during a lull in the fighting
9. Armed members of the KPD from the Neuhausen district of Munich during a ‘Red Army’ parade in the city, 22 April 1919
10. Counterrevolutionary Freikorps troops entering Munich, beginning of May 1919
11. Anton Drexler, founder in 1919 of the DAP (German Workers’ Party)
12. Ernst Röhm, the ‘machine-gun king’, whose access to weapons and contacts in the Bavarian army were important to Hitler in the early 1920s
13. Hitler’s DAP membership card, contradicting his claim to be the seventh member of the party
14. Hitler speaking on the Marsfeld in Munich at the first Party Rally of the , 28 January 1923
15. ‘Hitler speaks!’ NSDAP mass meeting, Cirkus Krone, Munich, 1923
16. Paramilitary organizations during the church service at the ‘German Day’ in Nuremberg, 2 September 1923
17. Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler, and Friedrich Weber (centre, behind Hitler, Christian Weber) during the march-past of the SA and other paramilitary groups to mark the laying of the war memorial foundation stone, Munich, 4 November 1923
18. The putsch: armed SA men (centre, holding the old Reich flag, Heinrich Himmler, right, with fur collar, Ernst Röhm) manning a barricade outside the War Ministry in Ludwigstraße, Munich, 9 November 1923
19. The putsch: armed putschists from the area around Munich, 9 November 1923
20. Defendants at the trial of the putschists: left to right, Heinz Pernet, Friedrich Weber, Wilhelm Frick, Hermann Kriebel, Erich Ludendorff, Adolf Hitler, Wilhelm Brückner, Ernst Röhm, Robert Wagner
21. Hitler posing for a photograph, hurriedly taken by Hoffman because of the cold, at the gate to the town of Landsberg am Lech, immediately after his release from imprisonment
22. Hitler in Landsberg, postcard, 1924
23. The image: Hitler in Bavarian costume (rejected), 1925/6
24. The image: Hitler in a raincoat (accepted), 1925/6
25. The image: Hitler with his alsatian, Prinz, 1925 (rejected, from a broken plate)
26. The Party Rally, Weimar, 3–4 July 1926: Hitler, standing in a car in light-coloured raincoat, taking the march-past of the SA, whose banner carries the slogan: ‘Death to Marxism’. Immediately to Hitler’s right is Wilhelm Frick and, beneath him, facing the camera, Julius Streicher
27. The Party Rally, Nuremberg, 21 August 1927: left to right, Julius Streicher, Georg Hallermann, Franz von Pfeffer, Rudolf Heß, Adolf Hitler, Ulrich Graf
28. Hitler in SA uniform (rejected), 1928/9
29. Hitler in rhetorical pose. Postcard from August 1927. The caption reads: ‘In the passing of thousands of years, heroism will never be spoken of without remembering the German army of the world war’
30. Hitler speaking to the NSDAP leadership, Munich, 30 August 1928. Left to right: Alfred Rosenberg, Walter Buch, Franz Xaver Schwarz, Hitler, Gregor Strasser, Heinrich Himmler. Sitting by the door, hands clasped, is Julius Streicher: to his left is Robert Ley
31. Geli Raubal and Hitler, c. 1930
32. Eva braun in Heinrich Hoffmann’s studio, early 1930s
33. Reich President Paul von Hindenburg
34. Reich Chancellor Heinrich Brüning (left) with Benito Mussolini, Rome, August 1931
35. Reich Chancellor Franz von Papen (front, right), with State Secretary Dr Otto Meissner, at the annual celebration of the Reich Constitution, 11 August 1932. Behind von Papen is Reich Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Freiherr von Gayl, who, that very day, put forward proposals to make Weimar’s liberal constitution distinctly more authoritarian
36. Gregor Strasser and Joseph Goebbels watching the SA parade past Hitler, Braunschweig, 18 October 1931
37. Ernst Thälmann, leader of the KPD, at a rally of the ‘Red Front’ during the growing crisis of Weimar democracy, c. 1930
38. Nazi election poster, 1932, directed against the SPD and the Jews. The slongan reads: ‘Marxism is the Guardian Angel of Capitalism. Vote National Socialist, List 1’
39. Candidate placards for the presidential election, Berlin, April 1932
40. Discussion at Neudeck, the home of Reich President Paul von Hindenburg, 1932. Left to right: Reich Chancellor Franz von Papen, State Secretary Otto Meissner (back to camera), Reich Minister of the Interior Wilhelm von Gayl, Hindenburg, and Reichswehr Minister Kurt von Schleicher