The Third Reich

by Thomas Childers

  Goebbels had planned and organized the pogrom, with Hitler’s apparent approval, but without consultation with Himmler or Göring. Some have speculated that Goebbels’s action was prompted by a desire to regain favor with Hitler. He had for some time been carrying on an affair with a movie actress and had asked Hitler for permission to divorce his wife. But divorce, Hitler responded, was out of the question. The Führer, after all, had himself been a member of the Goebbels wedding, and the Goebbels family, with its virtual assembly line of children, to whom Hitler was godfather, had assumed the unofficial role of first family of the Third Reich. Goebbels remained a dynamo of energy, publishing, writing articles for various Nazi journals and newspapers, giving radio addresses, and directing the party’s propaganda machine. But with Himmler’s appointment as top police official in the Reich and Göring’s new post as head of the Four Year Plan, both in 1936, the two men were fast becoming the most powerful players in the National Socialist state. Goebbels’s star was fading, and he needed to do something to reestablish himself in Hitler’s good graces. Be that as it may, Kristallnacht did not mark the onset of a new offensive against the Jews but the crest of a wave of anti-Semitic riots that had gathered momentum throughout the summer and early fall.

  For the Jews of Germany, Kristallnacht was a sheer disaster, bringing the end of any lingering illusions about the Third Reich. Most Jews had insurance policies that should have covered much of the property damage, but the regime voided those policies and imposed a one-billion-mark indemnity on the Jews, forcing them to pay for the destruction visited on them during that terrible night. The beatings, the murders, the arson, the arrests, the concentration camps, and the failure of the police or fire departments to help made it appallingly clear that until then, German Jews still clung to the belief that the law protected them. For the most part, their incarceration in the camps was of short duration—a few weeks, a month—but it provided them with a menacing preview of a dark future.

  Although many Germans complained about what they considered as irresponsible destruction of valuable property on that night, some local reports emphasized moral reservations. In what was a common refrain, the mayor of Borgentreich in Westphalia reported that “in many ways, the population didn’t understand the action, or put better, didn’t want to understand it. The Jews are the objects of sympathy. Especially because they lost house and home and [because] male Jews were taken to a concentration camp . . . I estimate that here at least sixty percent of the population thought like this.”

  Although Kristallnacht provoked shock in much of the German public, there were few public displays of sympathy for the Jews; open expressions of disapproval were dangerous and usually took the form of criticism of the “senseless destruction of property” and “pogrom anti-Semitism.” The response of the people was definitely divided, with widespread rejection of the pogrom coexisting with a general approval of the regime’s “legal” actions against the Jews. The Nazi leadership took notice and drew several important conclusions from the public’s ambivalent reaction. The people, SD reports noted, were shocked by the government-sanctioned violence. Until Kristallnacht Germans could maintain the illusion that this kind of vicious terrorism was the doing of the unruly SA and other local radicals. Now they, like the Jewish victims of that night, were confronted by the ugly realization that this was no spontaneous “excess” by party militants. This was a savage assault on the Jews conceived, fomented, and conducted by the regime itself. To Heydrich, the lessons of that night were quite clear: there could be no more open violence against the Jews, no more vigilante action. In the future, the SS insisted, anti-Jewish measures should follow a “more rational course.” Emigration—forced emigration—was the key, and since the SS had seized the initiative in Jewish emigration policy, Himmler would henceforth stake his claim to leadership in the regime’s overall Jewish policy.

  While the ruins of Germany’s synagogues still smoldered, the regime moved quickly to complete the exclusion of the Jews from the German economy. On November 12, Göring, with Hitler’s approval, convened a meeting on the “Jewish question” with leading figures in the regime as well as various police officials. Still fuming at Goebbels’s reckless action and the destruction of valuable property, Göring made it clear that “something decisive must be done. . . . I have had enough of these demonstrations. It is not the Jew they harm but myself as final authority for coordinating the German economy.” The solution to the “Jewish question,” Göring asserted, was to be found in the complete elimination of Jews from the German economy, and since the problem was “mainly an economic one, it is from the economic angle that it will have to be tackled.”

  At that meeting and in subsequent days Göring issued a series of stringent economic decrees meant to drive Jews completely out of the German economy. Life was to be made so miserable, so unsustainable for the Jews that they would have no choice but to leave the country. According to the decrees of November 12, Jews were compelled to sell their retail businesses and any export mail order firms; they could not work as independent craftsmen; they could not sell any goods and services; they could not act as managers of businesses or be members of consumer cooperatives; they could not participate in the welfare system. In addition, all Jewish children were expelled from public schools, and Jews were forbidden access to certain public sites (parks, movie theaters, among others), or limited to a few hours each day; Jews were also deprived of their driver’s licenses and were forbidden to own radios. At the conclusion of the November 12 meeting, Göring commented: “I would not wish to be a Jew in Germany tonight.”

  That meeting also marked Göring’s assertion of leadership in all matters related to Jewish policy. Although he would face relentless pressure from the SS/SD, Göring confirmed his claim by issuing a December directive to all government departments that stated: “to ensure uniform treatment of the Jewish question, upon which rests the handling of economic matters, I am asking that all decrees and other important orders touching upon Jewish matters be cleared through my office and that absolutely no independent initiatives on the Jewish question be undertaken.”

  By the close of 1938, the economic destruction of the Jewish community was virtually complete. Aryanization was intensified, and Jews were entirely thrown back upon their own shrinking community to survive. The events of 1938 did produce a dramatic surge of Jewish emigration—more than eighty thousand fled the country. But leaving was not easy. While the SS was pursuing a policy of Jewish emigration—increasingly forced—other state ministries were, in typical Nazi fashion, making it more and more difficult for Jews to leave. Jews were forced to pay an exorbitant emigration tax and a special “Jew tax” that, along with Aryanization, Nazi extortion at the grass roots, and other exploitative economic measures, left most Jews lacking the funds necessary to acquire visas. And it was also increasingly difficult to find countries willing to take impoverished refugees from Germany, especially since most countries were still dealing with the effects of the Great Depression.

  In its annual report for 1938, the SD concluded that “as far as laws and edicts are concerned, the Jewish question in Germany has been resolved.” From January 1 through November 8, legislation and administrative directives were designed to exclude Jews from German society. With the action of November 9–10, the report proudly proclaimed, the removal of Jews from “all areas of public and private life has for all practical purposes been realized.” Four years earlier an SD memorandum had asserted that for Jews their existence must be rendered so unbearable, so impossible that they would find Germany “a country without a future.” In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, that dark vision had become stark reality.

  12

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  COURTING DISASTER

  Race and war were inextricably intertwined in Nazi thinking. While ruthlessly imposing their radical racial vision on the country, the Nazis simultaneously launched a systematic campaign to militarize German society. If Germany was to reach its rightful p
otential as a great—indeed, hegemonic—power and provide a self-sustaining base for the healthy cultivation of its racial stock, the Reich would have to expand beyond its cramped frontiers. Even a return to the borders of 1914 was unacceptable. The German people required Lebensraum, living space, that would provide the territory and resources necessary to make Germany economically self-sufficient—“autarkic” was the term favored by the regime. The acquisition of new territory and a self-sustaining economy would render Germany invulnerable to an enemy blockade and would provide the raw materials necessary for exerting German power over the European continent—and perhaps beyond. Although Hitler maintained a public pretense that this living space could be acquired by peaceful means, it was palpably obvious to both the Foreign Office and the military and increasingly to the public that it could not be attained without military conquest.

  Hitler’s determination to acquire Lebensraum was hardly a hidden agenda. Expansion meant continental expansion—and continental expansion meant the East. In this, Hitler’s geopolitical aims did not differ significantly from those of Imperial Germany during the Great War, but the ideological vision underlying them did. Hitler hoped to establish a vast central European imperium, the geographic and racial nucleus of which would be a “Greater Germany,” uniting all ethnic Germans and cleansed of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and other racially inferior elements. Some territories would be annexed outright, their native populations expelled; others would be transformed into satellite states. Hardy German settlers would be dispatched to people the eastern borderlands—warrior farmers, tilling the land and guarding the frontier against Slavs and other racial enemies. Diplomacy would set the stage for German expansion, but ultimately Hitler trained his sights on a war of conquest.

  All of this, of course, required a full demolition of the Versailles Treaty, but during 1933 and 1934 Hitler’s attention was absorbed by the seizure and consolidation of power. Germany was militarily weak and vulnerable to foreign, especially French, intervention, a situation that dictated restraint in international affairs. Hitler was careful. As he set about undermining the Versailles settlement, his standard operating procedure was to proclaim his fervent desire for peace and international cooperation, while privately plotting a more aggressive strategy. Until the very brink of war in 1939, this modus operandi never varied. Every assault on the Treaty of Versailles was invariably couched in the language of international understanding.

  Despite repeated assurances from Hitler, suspicions of German intentions were heightened in October 1933 when, in his first initiative in foreign policy, Hitler abruptly withdrew Germany from the World Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations. The disarmament conference sponsored by the League of Nations had been convened in February 1932, and when Hitler assumed the chancellorship, his opening performance on the stage of world politics was to make a typically theatrical offer. “Our boundless love for and loyalty to our own national traditions makes us respect the national claims of others and makes us desire from the bottom of our hearts to live with them in peace and friendship.” But Germany alone had been forced to disarm at Versailles, rendering the country defenseless. Germany would be willing at any time “to undertake further obligations in regard to international security, if all the other nations are ready on their side to do the same.”

  Since Germany was restricted by the Versailles Treaty to a military of only 100,000 troops, had no heavy weapons, no air force, and no battle fleet, it was an easy—and disingenuous—offer to make. If the international community was unprepared for such a radical offer, Hitler suggested more specifically that France might reduce its military down to German levels or alternatively that Germany be allowed to increase its forces to match those of France. When, not surprisingly, France balked, Hitler insisted that all Germany was seeking was to be treated as an equal in matters of international security. Had not Germany, “in her state of defenselessness and disarmament, greater justification in demanding security than the over-armed states bound together in military alliances?” But that, he implied, was apparently not the intention of the French, who seemed determined to maintain their vast military superiority over Germany.

  While expressing his deepest regrets, Hitler announced that Germany was forced to leave the Disarmament Conference. At the same time, he also declared Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations. In a statement to the public on October 14, he explained that since the powers gathered in Geneva were intent on perpetuating “an unjust and degrading discrimination of the German people,” the Reich government could not “under these circumstances, feel itself able to participate any longer as a second-class nation without rights of its own in negotiations which can only result in further dictates.”

  The move aroused uneasiness in the international community, especially in France, where Hitler’s grand proposal to disarm completely if France and other states did the same was scorned as a sham—an offer that he knew would not, could not, be accepted. It was, Paris maintained, nothing more than a transparent ruse to allow Germany to cast off the armaments restrictions of Versailles. Besides, France’s armed forces were the largest in Europe, and Paris was not about to forfeit its strategic advantage.

  To those abroad who accused him of harboring aggressive intentions, Hitler dipped into his limitless stock of sanctimony to reply that all he wanted was “to provide work and bread to the German Volk,” and this he could do only if “peace and quiet” prevailed. No one should assume that “I would be so mad as to want a war.” Foreign statesmen were unimpressed, but Hitler’s action played very well inside Germany. Here at last was a German leader who would not be pushed around by France and Britain. Not only was Hitler ruthlessly combating Germany’s domestic enemies, he was standing up for Germany’s rights in the international arena. He was bent on expunging Germany’s disgrace of 1918. This theme remained a major leitmotif of Hitler’s policy in these years, reprised in speeches without number.

  Eager to display the public’s enthusiastic support for the Hitler government, the Nazis staged an “election” on November 12, summoning the nation to approve the regime’s actions since January 30. Back in fighting form, Goebbels embarked on a vigorous public campaign in the usual Nazi style. It was a plebiscite not only on Hitler’s audacious foreign policy but his murderous suppression of domestic opposition. The results were not surprising. Ninety-eight percent of those voting cast a “yes” ballot in support of the regime, and although the usual intimidation no doubt played a significant role, there can be little doubt that Hitler’s moves found favor with a majority of Germans.

  While Germans hailed Hitler’s audacity, French suspicions proved well founded. In December 1933, the German High Command, with Hitler’s encouragement, drafted a program for a vast expansion of the armed forces. It called for a peacetime army of twenty-one divisions, or about 300,000 troops, by 1938 and a field army of sixty-three divisions—proposals that were a blatant violation of the armaments clauses of the Versailles Treaty. These strength levels were intended to provide Germany with a force capable of fighting a defensive war on multiple fronts. It was to be a “Peace Army,” strong enough to guarantee German security. Then in the spring of 1934 Hitler demanded that these goals be attained by October, a target date the army felt was unrealistic. Yet by the end of February 1935, the German army had already reached a troop strength of 280,000. In early March, the High Command proposed a peacetime army of thirty to thirty-six divisions, numbers that Hitler gladly endorsed.

  Hitler meanwhile continued to portray himself as a man of peace. In January 1934 he entered into a ten-year nonaggression pact with Poland, a move that to some seemed to signal Germany’s willingness to recognize its existing eastern borders—or at least to pledge that any modification would come via peaceful negotiation. It was a step that his Weimar predecessors had signally refused to take and both his generals and Foreign Office opposed. The pact was not popular in Germany, but it strengthened Hitler’s claim to be a reasonable statesman deter
mined to revise the Versailles Treaty but willing to live in peace with his neighbors. Above all, however, it was a shrewdly calculated move to undermine the system of Eastern European alliances—the Little Entente—that France had concluded with Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia over the course of the 1920s.

  Hitler’s international credibility suffered a serious setback in July 1934 when Austrian Nazis, with unofficial support from Berlin, attempted a coup against Engelbert Dollfuss and his dictatorial government in Austria. Austrian Nazis assassinated Dollfuss, briefly seized the national radio, and battled pro-government forces all across the country. The Putsch was quickly crushed. The army remained loyal to the government; Nazis were arrested; Dollfuss’s assassins were hanged; and the party slipped deeper underground. The Germans continued to insist that they had played no part in the Putsch, but their fervent protestations of innocence only served to convince international opinion of their complicity. Most important, the Putsch dealt a blow to Hitler’s efforts to establish closer ties with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who distrusted Hitler and viewed himself as the protector of Austrian sovereignty.

  For all of his reassurances, Hitler was determined to rearm, and his efforts were already under way when Germany exited the Disarmament Conference in October 1933. In his first days in office, he had pledged to military leaders that rearmament would be his highest priority, even if that meant radically reordering Germany’s economic priorities, committing the country’s still-fragile economy to an immense program of rearmament. Hitler interpreted the tepid response of the Western powers to his brusque withdrawal from the Disarmament Conference as evidence that Britain and France were weak, that they would do little to thwart his determination to rearm and acquire Lebensraum in the East. That assumption was put to the test in the spring of 1935, when on March 9 Hitler suddenly announced his intention to build an air force and hinted darkly that the process was already well under way. A week later he informed the international community that he would create a mass army of half a million troops. Germany would also introduce compulsory military service, a move explicitly forbidden by the Versailles settlement. These measures were a direct challenge to the Western powers, but they were, as usual, presented as purely defensive moves; surely, Hitler argued, Germany had the right of self-defense.