Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  The result was that the Western powers now issued guarantees of aid to Greece and Rumania also. Germany then warned the smaller European countries against “English lures,” thus generating more nervousness. Whereupon the United States, after years of disillusioned retreat into isolation from international affairs, let its voice be heard once more. On April 14 President Roosevelt addressed a letter to Hitler and Mussolini calling upon them to give a ten-year guarantee of nonaggression to thirty-one countries, which he mentioned by name.

  Mussolini at first refused to acknowledge receipt of the message. Hitler, however, was delighted at this unexpected challenge. Ever since he had first come forth as a speaker, his oratorical temperament had always responded best in argument. The naive demagoguery of Roosevelt’s appeal, with its listing of countries with which neither Germany nor Italy had common borders or differences of opinion (among them Eire, Spain, Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Persia), offered Hitler an easy target. He announced through DNB, the German News Agency, that he would deliver his reply in a speech to the Reichstag.

  Hitler’s speech of April 28 was one of the recognizable milestones along the course of the European crisis. It marked the destination as war. Following Hitler’s tried-and-true pattern, it was full of avowals of peace, loud in asseverations of innocence, and silent about all his real intentions. Once again Hitler tried to commend himself as the spokesman for a program of limited and moderate revisions in the East; but attacks upon the Soviet Union as evil incarnate were noticeably absent. Simultaneously he displayed all his sarcasm, all his apparent logic and hypnotic persuasiveness, so that many a listener called the speech “probably the most brilliant oration he ever gave.”119 He combined his attacks upon England with expressions of admiration and friendly feelings for her. He assured Poland that despite all his disappointments with her he was ready to continue negotiations. And he ranted against the “international warmongers,” the “provocateurs,” and “enemies of peace” whose aim was to recruit “mercenaries of the European democracies against Germany.” He denounced the “jugglers of Versailles who, either in their maliciousness or their thoughtlessness, placed 100 powder barrels all over Europe.”

  Finally he came to the climax, his answer to the American President, which was greeted by the deputies with tempestuous enthusiasm and roars of laughter. Hitler divided Roosevelt’s letter into twenty-one points, which he answered in sections. The American President, he said, had pointed out to him the general fear of war; but Germany had participated in none of the fourteen wars that had been waged since 1919—“but in which the States of the ‘Western Hemisphere,’ in whose name President Roosevelt speaks, were indeed concerned.” Germany also had nothing to do with the twenty-six “violent interventions and sanctions carried through by means of bloodshed and force” during that period, whereas the United States, for example, had carried out military interventions in six cases. Furthermore, the President had pleaded for the solution of all problems at the conference table, but America herself had given sharpest expression to her mistrust in the effectiveness of conferences by leaving the League of Nations, “the greatest conference of all time”—from which Germany, in violation of Wilson’s pledge, was for a long time excluded. In spite of this “most bitter experience,” Germany had not followed the example of the United States until his, Hitler’s, administration.

  The President was also making himself the advocate of disarmament. But Germany had, for all times, learned her lesson, ever since she had appeared unarmed at the conference table in Versailles and been “subjected to even greater degradation than can ever have been inflicted on the chieftains of the Sioux tribes.” Roosevelt was taking so great an interest in Germany’s intentions in Europe that the question necessarily arose what aims American foreign policy was pursuing, for example, toward Central or South American countries. The President would surely regard such a question as tactless and refer to the Monroe Doctrine. And although it was surely tempting for the German government to behave in the same way, it had nevertheless addressed all the countries mentioned by Roosevelt and asked whether they felt threatened by Germany. “The reply was in all cases negative, in some instances strongly so.” However, Hitler continued, “it is true that I could not cause inquiries to be made of certain of the States and nations mentioned because they themselves—as, for example, Syria—are at present not in possession of their freedom, but are occupied and consequently deprived of their rights by the military agents of the democratic States.” Then he continued:

  Mr. Roosevelt! I fully understand that the vastness of your nation and the immense wealth of your country allow you to feel responsible for the history of the whole world and for the history of all nations. I, sir, am placed in a much more modest and smaller sphere…. I cannot feel myself responsible for the fate of the world, as this world took no interest in the pitiful state of my own people.

  I have regarded myself as called upon by Providence to serve my own people alone and to deliver them from their frightful misery….

  I have conquered chaos in Germany, re-established order and enormously increased production in all branches of our national economy by strenuous efforts…. I have succeeded in finding useful work once more for the whole of 7,000,000 unemployed, who so appeal to the hearts of us all…. I [have] united the German people politically, but I have also re-armed them; I have also endeavored to destroy sheet by sheet that Treaty which in its 448 articles contains the vilest oppression which peoples and human beings have ever been expected to put up with.

  I have brought back to the Reich provinces stolen from us in 1919; I have led back to their native country millions of Germans who were torn away from us and were in misery; I have re-established the historic unity of German living space and, Mr. Roosevelt, I have endeavored to attain all this without spilling blood and without bringing to my people, and consequently to others, the misery of war.

  I, who twenty-one years ago was an unknown worker and soldier of my people, have attained this, Mr. Roosevelt, by my own energy…. You, Mr. Roosevelt, have a much easier task in comparison. You became President of the United States in 1933 when I became Chancellor of the Reich. In other words, from the very outset you stepped to the head of one of the largest and wealthiest States in the world…. Conditions prevailing in your country are on such a large scale that you can find time and leisure to give your attention to universal problems…. My world, Mr. Roosevelt… is unfortunately much smaller… for it is limited to my people.

  I believe, however, that this is the way in which I can be of the most service to that for which we are all concerned, namely, the justice, well-being, progress and peace of the whole human community.120

  This speech contained more than mere rhetorical effects. Implicit in it was a remarkable political decision. Two days earlier England had introduced conscription; and in reply Hitler now abrogated the Anglo-German Naval Treaty and the Nonaggression Pact with Poland. Dramatic though they seemed, these declarations had no immediate consequences; they were only a gesture. But with that gesture. Hitler liquidated the pledge contained in all such agreements, the pledge to settle disputes peaceably. In fact the speech as a whole might best be compared with the Western powers’ guarantee of Poland, or with Roosevelt’s intervention. It was a moral declaration of war. The adversaries were taking up their positions.

  Hitler had delivered his speech on April 28. On April 30 the British ambassador in Paris asked French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet what he thought about Hitler’s somewhat uncanny silence in regard to Russia. , And in fact from this moment on the Soviet Union, hitherto merely a mighty shadow on the periphery, began to move into the center of events. Hitler’s reticence was as much a symptom of the changing situation as the sudden activity of the Western powers toward Russia. A secret race for alliances was beginning, heightened on all sides by distrust, fear, and jealousy. Upon the outcome of that race the question of war or peace would be decided.

  The initial move had
come on April 15, with an offer by France to the Soviet Union to adjust the treaty of 1935 to the changed world situation. For the system of collective security, which the appeasers had allowed Hitler to wrest from them during the period of lovely illusions and which they were now hurriedly trying to reinstate, could have a deterrent effect only if Moscow participated, thus convincing Hitler of the hopelessness of resorting to force. From the start the negotiations, into which England too soon entered, suffered from the mutual distrust of the participants. With reason, Stalin doubted the Western powers’ determination to resist, while the Western powers in their turn, and above all Chamberlain, could never overcome the deeply rooted suspicion that the bourgeois world felt for the land of world revolution. Nor were their advances of any great interest to Moscow, since clumsy diplomacy had obligated the West to defend the entire girdle outside the Soviet Union from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

  In addition, the negotiating position of the Western powers was hampered by the constant efforts of the Eastern European nations to interfere. They passionately opposed any alliance with the Soviet Union and regarded any guarantees by her as sealing their own doom. In fact the Western diplomats were soon forced to realize that Moscow could be won over only by considerable territorial, strategic, and political concessions that did not look so very dissimilar to the ones they wanted to refuse, with the Soviet Union’s aid, to grant Hitler. If the efforts of the Western powers were inspired by the principle of protecting the small and weak nations against the expansionist greed of the great nations, they could not help falling into an insoluble dilemma. “On the basis of these principles,” the French Foreign Minister formulated this impasse, “a treaty with the Kremlin cannot be arranged, for these are not the Kremlin’s principles. Where community of principles is lacking, there can be no negotiating on the basis of principles. In that case only the primitive form of human conduct can obtain: force and exchange. Interests can be bartered, advantages that are hoped for and disadvantages which one wishes to avoid, booty that one would like to seize, violence that one will not put up with. All these factors can be weighed against one another, move for move, cash for cash…. Western diplomacy, on the other hand, provides a spectacle of well-meaning and dreamlike impotence.”121

  The course of the negotiations of the following months must be seen in this light, especially the still controversial question of whether the Soviet side seriously sought an agreement or was not merely bent on keeping out of the obviously approaching conflict, even of furthering it, in order later to carry the doctrine of revolution into an exhausted, shattered Europe with better chances for success than ever before. Even while the protracted negotiations were in progress, constantly interrupted by fresh scruples on the part of the West, the Soviet Union began its bold double game with Hitler. After a speech by Stalin on March 10 had dropped the first hint, the Soviet Union several times approached the German government and made plain its interest in a rearrangement of relations. Ideological differences, the Russians indicated, “need… not disturb.” The Soviet Union replaced her Foreign Minister of many years’ standing, Maxim Litvinov—a man of Western orientation and Jewish descent who figured invariably in Nazi polemics as “the Jew Finkelstein”—by Vyacheslav Molotov, and inquired in Berlin whether this shift might favorably influence the German attitude.122

  We have no reason to think that the leaders of the Soviet Union were unaware of Hitler’s changeless aim: the great war to the East, the conquest of an empire at Russia’s expense. But they were, unless all indications are deceptive, prepared for the moment to take into the bargain a tremendous increase in power for Hitler’s Reich, and even its first expansive step toward the East. Chief among their motives was the fear that the capitalist and Fascist powers might come to an arrangement after all, in spite of their momentary hostility, and divert German dynamism against the common Communist enemy in the East. Since the end of the World War, in which Russia had lost her western provinces and the Baltic countries, the Soviet Union had regarded itself as also a “revisionist power.” And Stalin evidently expected that Hitler would be more inclined to understand and treat generously the Soviet Union’s determination to reconquer the lost territories than would the slow-moving statesmen of the West with their scruples, principles, and moralistic pettiness. Fear and the determination to expand: these two fundamental motivations of Hitler were also Stalin’s.

  Tactically, Moscow’s initiatives could not have come more conveniently for Hitler. To be sure, anti-Bolshevism had been one of the great themes of his political career. The Communist Revolution had repeatedly provided him with compelling images of horror. Thousands of times he had conjured up the “human slaughterhouses” in the interior of Russia, the “burning villages” and “deserted cities” with their destroyed churches, raped women, and GPU executioners. National Socialism and Communism were “worlds apart,” he had declared; the gulf between them could never be bridged. Unlike the ideologically indifferent Ribbentrop, who soon after Stalin’s speech of March 10 had recommended an approach to the Soviet Union, Hitler was uncertain, the captive of his own ideology. And during the months of negotiations he repeatedly wavered. Several times he ordered the contacts to be broken off. Only his profound disappointment at the conduct of England and the vast profit to be had from avoiding the nightmare of fighting on two fronts during the planned attack on Poland finally persuaded him to set aside all his scruples. And just as Stalin entered upon the desperate gamble with the “Fascist world plague” in the expectation of ultimately triumphing, so Hitler reassured himself that later on he would be able to make up for his “betrayal,” since he had not abandoned his intention of bringing about a later confrontation with the Soviet Union. In fact, he was preparing for that by establishing a common border. What was involved, he shortly afterward told his intimates, was a “pact with Satan to drive out the devil.” And, on August 11, only a few days before Ribbentrop’s sensational trip to Moscow, Hitler informed a foreign visitor with almost incomprehensible candor: “Everything I am doing is directed against Russia; if the West is too stupid and too blind to grasp this, I shall be forced to come to an understanding with the Russians, strike at the West, and then after its defeat turn against the Soviet Union with my assembled forces.”123 Despite all his cynicism, his lack of scruple where tactics were concerned, Hitler was too much of an ideologist to follow the logic of his plans without uneasiness. He was never able to forget completely that the pact with Moscow was only the second-best solution.

  As if circumstances were playing into his hands, a new improvement in his position came to him around this same time. Disturbed by the rumors of an impending conflict, Mussolini’s son-in-law and Foreign Minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, invited Ribbentrop to Milan early in May and urged him to postpone the outbreak of the war for at least three years, in view of Italy’s inadequate preparations. The German Foreign Minister informed Ciano that the great conflict was planned only “after a long period of peace of from four to five years.” When the vague exchange of ideas produced a few other points of agreement, Mussolini abruptly took a hand personally in the negotiations. For years, out of an obscure feeling of anxiety, he had refused to define Italy’s relationship to Germany in a treaty of alliance specifying mutual obligations. Now he had Ciano announce without more ado that Germany and Italy had agreed on a military alliance.

  Although Hitler might feel that this pact would strengthen his position vis-à-vis the Western powers, the alliance could only bring misfortune to Mussolini. The elementary rules of diplomacy should have taught him better: since he owed to the backing of Germany whatever conquests the world would ever permit him to make, his next move should have been to secure what he had acquired by coming to an agreement with the Western powers. Instead he now tied his country’s destiny unconditionally to a stronger power that was bent on war, and thus reduced himself to the status of a vassal. Henceforth he must, as he had once said in a moment of exuberance in Berlin, “march to the end” with
Hitler.

  The so-called Pact of Steel obligated each of the partners to provide military support to the other upon the outbreak of hostilities. It drew no distinction between attacker and attacked, between offensive and defensive arms. It was an unconditional pledge of military aid. Later, when Ciano first saw the German draft that was subsequently incorporated almost unchanged into the wording of the pact, he said: “I have never read a treaty like it. It is real dynamite.”

  The pact was signed in a grand ceremony in the Berlin chancellery on May 22, 1939. “I found Hitler very well, quite serene, less aggressive, slightly aged,” the Italian Foreign Minister noted. “There are somewhat darker rings around his eyes. He sleeps little. Less and less.” Mussolini himself seems to have received the reports from his Berlin delegation with some anxiety. A week later he sent a personal memorandum to Hitler in which he once again emphasized Italy’s desire for a period of several years of peace. He recommended using this interlude for “loosening the inner cohesion of our enemies by favoring the anti-Semitic movements, supporting… the pacifistic movements, promoting aspirations for autonomy (Alsace, Brittany, Corsica, Ireland), accelerating the breakdown of morals, and inciting the colonial peoples to rebellion.”124

  The day after the signing of the Pact of Steel Hitler had summoned the commanders in chief of the army, navy, and air force to his office in the chancellery and outlined his ideas and intentions. According to the minutes kept by his chief adjutant, Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf Schmundt, he predicted with extraordinary acuteness the course of the first phase of the war: the overwhelming thrust into Holland and Belgium and subsequently—contrary to the strategy of the First World War—an advance not upon Paris but on the Channel ports, as launching places for the bombing and blockade of England. For in this speech England appeared as the chief antagonist. Hitler said: