Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis (Allen Lane History)
Page 29
‘Growing unrest and discontent’ as a consequence of living, working, and housing conditions was reported among the working class of one of the most industrialized regions, the Ruhr District, in early 1939.15 By summer, reports from the same area were pointing to the sharp rise in the cases of sickness among industrial workers in armaments factories and coal-mines – whether, as some claimed, from ‘lack of discipline’, or, more likely, from genuine overwork, or from a combination of both can only be surmised.16 By then, the labour situation was described as ‘catastrophic’.17 Yet sullen apathy, not rebelliousness, characterized a work-force worn down by intensified production demands.18 Even so, if the industrial working class was politically neutralized, its productive capacity had by all accounts reached its peak. This in itself posed an evident threat to any long-term preparations for war.
Hitler showed no interest in the details of economic difficulties pouring in from every part of the Reich. He was sensitive, as he had been in the mid 1930s, to the impact on morale, refusing in 1938 to entertain any rise in food prices.19 But he had become increasingly preoccupied with foreign policy. Domestic issues were largely pushed to one side. Decisions were left untaken; much business was postponed or neglected; access to him was difficult. Even Lammers, in the absence of cabinet meetings now the sole link with the various government ministers, had been forced to plead with the Führer’s chief adjutant, Wilhelm Brückner, on 21 October 1938 for a brief audience with Hitler to discuss urgent business since, because of the demands of foreign policy, he had managed only one short meeting with him since 4 September.20 The reports of the ‘Trustees of Labour’ (Treuhänder der Arbeit) had normally been passed to Lammers and often brought directly to Hitler’s attention in 1937. But in 1938–9, as the labour crisis became acute, Hitler was verbally informed of the content, emphasizing the seriousness of the mounting labour problems, on only one occasion (at the meeting with Lammers in early September 1938) and most of the reports, regarded as highly repetitive, were by now not even reaching Lammers.21
With regard to agriculture, Hitler’s disinterest was even more marked. He simply refused to accede to Darré’s repeated requests for an audience and did not respond to the Agriculture Minister’s bombardment of the Reich Chancellery with memoranda about the critical situation. Only in October 1940 was Hitler finally persuaded to comment on the intense bitterness in the farming community about the labour shortage. He replied that their complaints would be attended to after the war.22
This reflected a key feature of Hitler’s thinking: war as panacea. Whatever the difficulties, they would be – and could only be – resolved by war. He was certainly alert to the dangers of a collapse in his popularity, and the likely domestic crisis which would then occur.23 The fears of a repeat of 1918 were never far away.24 He even seemed to sense that his own massive popularity had shaky foundations. ‘Since I’ve been politically active, and especially since I’ve been leading the Reich,’ he told his audience of newspaper editors in November 1938, ‘I have had only successes… What would then happen if we were some time to experience failure? That, too, could happen, gentlemen.’25 But he was speaking here of the ‘intellectual strata’, for whom he felt in any case nothing but contempt. If he took cognizance at all of the reports of poor mood among industrial workers and farmers, they must merely have confirmed his view that he had been correct all along: only war and expansion could provide the answer to Germany’s problems.
It is, in fact, doubtful whether he would have believed the accounts of poor morale, even if he had read them. Even three years or so earlier, when his adjutant at the time, Fritz Wiedemann, had tried to summarize the content of negative opinion reports, Hitler had refused to listen, shouting: ‘The mood in the people is not bad, but good. I know that better. It’s made bad through such reports. I forbid such things in future.’26 On the day Poland was invaded he would say to members of the Reichstag: ‘Don’t anyone tell me that in his Gau or his district, or his constituency (Gruppe), or his cell the mood could at some point be bad. You are responsible for the mood.’27 In April 1939, he took the adulation of the crowds at his fiftieth birthday celebrations, which, he claimed, had given him new strength, as the true indication of the mood of the people.28 Following one extraordinary triumph upon another, his self-belief had by this time been magnified into full-blown megalomania. Even among his private guests at the Berghof, he frequently compared himself with Napoleon, Bismarck, and other great historical figures.29 The rebuilding programmes that constantly preoccupied him were envisaged as his own lasting monument – a testament of greatness like the buildings of the Pharaohs or Caesars.30 He felt he was walking with destiny. Such a mentality allowed little space for the daily worries and concerns of ordinary people. It was much the same when Schacht or Göring brought the deteriorating economic situation to his attention. Such problems were, in his view, a mere passing phenomemon, a temporary irritant of no significance compared with the grandeur of his vision and the magnitude of the struggle ahead. Conventional economics – however limited his understanding – would, he was certain, never solve the problems. The sword alone, as he had repeatedly advocated since the 1920s, would produce the solution: the conquest of the ‘living space’ needed for survival. The lands of the East would one day provide for Germany. There would be no economic problems then. The opportunities awaited. But they had to be grasped quickly. His enemies – he had said so after Munich – were puny. But they were gathering strength. There was no time to lose.
It was a bizarre mentality. But in the summer of 1939, such a mentality was driving Germany towards European war. All along the way, Hitler had pushed at open doors. Revanchism and revisionism had given him his platform. Foreign Ministry mandarins, captains of industry, and above all the leaders of the armed forces had done everything – in their own interest – to ‘work towards the Führer’ in destroying Versailles and Locarno, pushing for economic expansion, building up a war machine. The weakened and divided western powers had given way at every step. They had provided the international backcloth to the expansion of Hitler’s power, to the diplomatic triumphs cheered to the echo by millions. The exalting of Hitler’s prestige had in turn elevated him to a position where he was held in awe even by his close entourage. The Führer cult removed him more and more from criticism, undermined opposition, inordinately strengthened his own hand against those who had done everything to build him up but now found themselves sidelined or bypassed. The traditional national-conservative power-elites had helped to make Hitler. But he now towered above them.31 The major shifts in personnel in the army leadership and Foreign Ministry in February 1938, and the great foreign-policy triumphs that followed, had removed the last possible constraining influences. Surrounded by lackeys, yes-men, and time-servers, Hitler’s power was by this time absolute. He could decide over war and peace.32
I
Hitler made public the abrupt shift in policy towards Poland and Great Britain in his big Reichstag speech of 28 April 1939.
The speech, lasting two hours and twenty minutes, had been occasioned by a message sent by President Roosevelt a fortnight earlier.33 Prompted by the invasion of Czecho-Slovakia, and in direct response to the German dictator’s aggressive speech in Wilhelmshaven on 1 April, the President had appealed to Hitler to give an assurance that he would desist from any attack for the next twenty-five years on thirty named countries – mainly European, but also including Iraq, Arabia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Iran. Were such an assurance to be given, the United States, declared Roosevelt, would play its part in working for disarmament and equal access to raw materials on world markets.34 Hitler was incensed by Roosevelt’s telegram. That it had been published in Washington before even being received in Berlin was taken as a slight. Hitler also thought it arrogant in tone.35 And the naming of the thirty countries allowed Hitler to claim that inquiries had been conducted in each, and that none felt threatened by Germany. Some, such as Syria, however, had been, he alleged, unable to reply
, since they were deprived of freedom and under the military control of democratic states, while the Republic of Ireland, he asserted, feared aggression from Britain, not from Germany.36 Roosevelt’s raising of the disarmament issue (out of which Hitler had made such capital a few years earlier) handed him a further propaganda gift. With heavy sarcasm, he tore into Roosevelt, ‘answering’ his claims in twenty-one points, each cheered to the rafters by the assembled members of the Reichstag, roaring with laughter as he poured scorn on the President.37
He returned to the Reich Chancellery drenched in sweat, ready for the hot bath that had been prepared for him.38 Civil servants in the Foreign Ministry thought he had ‘lashed out’ (ausgekeilt) in all directions, which Hitler took as a compliment. Many German listeners to the broadcast thought it one of the best speeches he had made.39 William Shirer, the American journalist in Berlin, was inclined to agree: ‘Hitler was a superb actor today,’ he wrote.40 The performance was largely for internal consumption. The outside world – at least those countries that felt they had accommodated Hitler for too long – were less impressed.
Preceding the vaudeville, Hitler had chosen the occasion to renounce the Non-Aggression Pact with Poland and the Naval Agreement with Britain. Memoranda to this effect had been handed over by the German embassies in Warsaw and London to coincide with the timing of the speech. Hitler, repeating his admiration for the British Empire, his search for an understanding, and that his only demand on Britain was the return of the former German colonies, blamed the renunciation of the naval pact on Britain’s ‘encirclement policy’.41 In reality, he was complying with the interests of the German navy, which felt its construction plans restricted by the pact and had been pressing for some time for Hitler to renounce it.42 The intransigence of the Poles over Danzig and the Corridor, their mobilization in March – in Hitler’s eyes almost as big an affront as the Czech mobilization the previous May – and the alignment with Britain against Germany were given as reasons for the ending of the Polish pact.43 The reasons were scarcely regarded as compelling outside Germany.
Since the end of March, which had brought the British guarantee for Poland, followed soon afterwards by the announcement that there was to be a British-Polish mutual assistance treaty, Hitler had, in fact, given up on the Poles. The military directives of early April were recognition of this. The Poles, he acknowledged, were not going to concede to German demands without a fight. So they would have their fight. And they would be smashed. Only the timing and conditions remained to be determined.
Hitler’s new aggressive stance towards Poland was certain of a warm welcome throughout the regime’s leadership, even among those who had opposed the high risk on Czecho-Slovakia the previous summer, and among broad swathes of the German population. The traditional anti-Polish sentiment in the Foreign Ministry was reflected in the relish with which Weizsäcker had conveyed the news to the Poles in early April that Germany was ending all negotiations.44 Anti-Polish feeling in the military was also rampant. Military leaders – even those with little time for Hitler – were enthusiastic about a revision of the disputed borders with Poland where they had been cool about Czecho-Slovakia. Ordinary soldiers were raring to be let loose at the Poles.45 The commanders of the armed forces’ branches were, moreover, better integrated from the outset into the military planning on Poland than they had been in the early stages of the Sudeten crisis.46 Despite the British guarantee, they had greater confidence than the previous year in Hitler pulling off yet another coup, and fewer fears of western involvement.47
At a meeting in his study in the New Reich Chancellery on 23 May, Hitler outlined his thinking on Poland and on wider strategic issues to a small group of top military leaders. The main points of his speech were noted down by his Wehrmacht Adjutant Lieutenant-Colonel Rudolf Schmundt. It was a frank address, even if some points (according to the noted record) were left ambiguous. It held out the prospect not only of an attack on Poland, but also made clear that the more far-reaching aim was to prepare for an inevitable showdown with Britain. Unlike the meeting on 5 November 1937 that Hoßbach had recorded, there is no indication that the military commanders were caused serious disquiet by what they heard. As on that occasion, the meeting had been called to deal with questions of raw materials allocation, arising from the priority that had been given in January to the naval Z-Plan.48 As then, Hitler did not deal with such specifics, but launched into a broad assessment of strategy, this time regarding Poland and the West. Other countries, including the Soviet Union, were scarcely touched upon.
Significantly – and an indication that reports of the mounting difficulties had not passed him by – Hitler began by emphasizing the need to solve Germany’s economic problems. His answer was the one he had been rehearsing for over fifteen years, though it was now more plainly stated than it had been in his first speech to military leaders on being appointed Chancellor, over six years earlier. ‘This is not possible without “breaking in” to other countries or attacking other people’s possessions,’ he baldly stated. In characteristic vein he continued: ‘Living space proportionate to the greatness of the State is fundamental to every Power. One can do without it for a time, but sooner or later the problems will have to be solved by hook or by crook. The alternatives are rise or decline. In fifteen or twenty years’ time the solution will be forced upon us. No German statesman can shirk the problem for longer.’
He turned to Poland. The Poles would always stand on the side of Germany’s enemies. The Non-Aggression Treaty had not altered this in the least. He made his intentions brutally clear. ‘It is not Danzig that is at stake. For us it is a matter of expanding our living space in the East and making food supplies secure and also solving the problem of the Baltic States. Food supplies can only be obtained from thinly populated areas. Over and above fertility, thorough German cultivation will tremendously increase the produce. No other openings can be seen in Europe.’ Colonies were no answer, he averred, since they were always subject to blockade by sea. In the event of war with the West, the territories in the East would provide food and labour.
He moved from economic to strategic considerations. The problem of Poland could not be dissociated from the showdown with the West. The Poles would cave in to Russian pressure. And they would seek to exploit any German military involvement with the western powers. He drew the conclusion from this that it was necessary ‘to attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity. We cannot expect a repetition of Czechia. There will be war. Our task is to isolate Poland. Success in isolating her will be decisive.’ He reserved to himself, therefore, the timing of any strike. Simultaneous conflict with the West had to be avoided. Should it, however, come to that – Hitler revealed here his priorities – ‘then the fight must be primarily against England and France’. He repeated – directly contradicting himself, if Schmundt’s notes are accurate – that the attack on Poland would only be successful if the West were kept out of it, but if that proved impossible ‘it is better to fall upon the West and finish off Poland at the same time’.
For the first time, there was less than outright hostility in his comments about the Soviet Union. Economic relations would only be possible, he said, once political relations had improved – an oblique reference to comments made by the new Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov a few days earlier.49 He did not, as had previously been the case, rule out such an improvement. He even suggested that Russia might be disinterested in the destruction of Poland.
His main concern was the coming showdown with the West, particularly with Britain. He doubted the possibility of peaceful coexistence in the long run. So it was necessary to prepare for conflict. A contest over hegemony, he implied (as he had done privately to Goebbels earlier in the year), was unavoidable. ‘Therefore England is our enemy and the showdown with England is a matter of life and death.’ He speculated on what the showdown would be like – speculations not remote from what was to happen a year later. Holland and Belgium would have to be overrun. Declarations of neutra
lity would be ignored. Once France, too, was defeated (which he did not dwell upon as a major difficulty), the bases on the west coast would enable the Luftwaffe and U-boats to effect the blockade that would bring Britain to its knees. The war would be an all-out one: ‘We must then burn our boats and it will no longer be a question of right or wrong but of to be or not to be for 80 million people.’ A war of ten to fifteen years had to be reckoned with. A long war had, therefore, to be prepared for, even though every attempt would be made to deliver a surprise knock-out blow at the outset – possible only if Germany avoided ‘sliding into’ war with Britain as a result of Poland. Clearly, Hitler was here, too, envisaging the elimination of Poland before any conflict with the West took place.50
Decisive in the conflict with Britain – and here Hitler indirectly provided the answer on raw materials allocation, and showed himself at the same time strategically still locked in the past – would not be air-power but the destruction of the British fleet. How, exactly, this would be achieved was not clarified. A special operations staff of the armed forces was to be set up to prepare the ground in detail and keep Hitler informed. ‘The aim is always to bring England to its knees,’ he stated.