by Ian Kershaw
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. 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. 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 opponents of the regime.
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 ‘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. 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.
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. 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 hubris 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. 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.
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Ceaseless Radicalization
I
To shrewd observers, it was clear: Hitler’s Rhineland coup had been the catalyst to a major power-shift in Europe; Germany’s ascendancy was an unpredictable and highly destabilizing element in the international order; the odds against a new European war in the foreseeable future had markedly shortened.
To the German public, Hitler once more professed himself a man of peace, cleverly insinuating who was to blame for the gathering storm-clouds of war. Speaking to a vast audience in the Berlin Lustgarten (a huge square in the city centre) on 1 May – once an international day of celebration of labouring people, now redubbed the ‘National Day of Celebration of the German People’ – he posed the rhetorical question: ‘I ask myself,’ he declared, ‘who are then these elements who wish to have no rest, no peace, and no understanding, who must continually agitate and sow mistrust? Who are they actually?’ Immediately picking up the implication, the crowd bayed: ‘The Jews.’ Hitler began again: ‘I know …’ and was interrupted by cheering that lasted for several minutes. When at last he was able to continue, he picked up his sentence, though – the desired effect achieved – now in quite different vein: ‘I know it is not the millions who would have to take up weapons if the intentions of these agitators were to succeed. Those are not the ones …’
The summer of 1936 was, however, as Hitler knew only too well, no time to stir up a new antisemitic campaign. In August, the Olympic Games were due to be staged in Berlin. Sport would be turned into a vehicle of nationalist politics and propaganda as never before. Nazi aesthetics of power would never have a wider audience. With the eyes of the world on Berlin, it was an opportunity not to be missed to present the new Germany’s best face to its hundreds of thousands of visitors from across the globe. No expense or effort had been spared in this cause. The positive image could not be endangered by putting the ‘dark’ side of the regime on view. Open anti-Jewish violence, such as had punctuated the previous summer, could not be permitted. With some difficulties, antisemitism was kept under wraps. The antisemitic zealots in the party had temporarily to be reined in. Other objectives were for the time being more important. Hitler could afford to bide his time in dealing with the Jews.
The Olympics were an enormous propaganda success for the Nazi regime. Hitler’s Germany was open to viewing for visitors from all over the world. Most of them went away mightily impressed. Away from the glamour of the Olympic Games and out of the public eye, the contrast with the external image of peaceful goodwill was sharp. By this time, the self-induced crisis in the German economy arising from the inability to provide both for guns and butter – to sustain supplies of raw materials both for armaments and for consumption – was reaching its watershed. A decision on the economic direction the country would take could not be deferred much longer.
II
Already by spring 1936, it had become clear that it was no longer possible to reconcile the demands of rapid rearmament and growing domestic consumption. Supplies of raw materials for the armaments industry were sufficient for only two months. Fuel supplies for the armed forces were in a particularly critical state. Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht was by now thoroughly alarmed at the accelerating tempo of rearmament and its inevitably damaging consequences for the economy. Only a sharp reduction in living standards (impossible without endangering the regime’s stability) or a big increase in exports (equally impossible given the regime’s priorities, exchange rate difficulties, and the condition of external markets) could in his view provide for an expanding armaments industry. He was adamant, therefore, that it was time to put the brakes on rearmament.
The military had other ideas. The leaders of the armed forces, uninterested in the niceties of economics but fully taken up by the potential of modern advanced weaponry, pressed unabatedly for rapid and massive acceleration of the armaments programme. The army leaders were not acting in response to pressure from Hitler. They had their own agenda. They were at the same time ‘working towards the Führer’, consciously or unconsciously acting ‘along his lines and towards his aim’ in the full knowledge that their rearmament ambitions wholly coincided with his political aims, and that they could depend upon his backing against attempts to throttle back on armament expenditure. Reich War Minister Werner von Blomberg, Colonel-General Werner Freiherr von Fritsch, Commander-in-Chief of the Army, and General Ludwig Beck, Chief of the Army General Staff, were thereby paving the way, in providing the necessary armed might, for the later expansionism which would leave them all trailing in Hitler’s wake.
Even so, the economic impasse seemed complete. Huge increases in allocation of scarce foreign currency were demanded by both the Ministry of Food and the Ministry of Armaments. The position could not be sustained. Fundamental economic priorities had to be established as a matter of urgency. Autarky and export lobbies could not both be satisfied. Hitler remained for months inactive. He had no patent solution to the problem. The key figure at this point was Göring.
Hoping to keep the party off his back, Schacht helped persuade Hitler to install Göring at the beginning of April as Plenipotentiary for the Securing
of the Raw Materials and Foreign Exchange Demands of the Reich. Göring’s brief was to overcome the crisis, get rearmament moving again, and force through a policy of autarky in fuel production. But by now Göring was in the driving-seat. Schacht was rapidly becoming yesterday’s man. In May, shocked at the new power-base that his own machiavellian manoeuvrings had unwittingly helped to create for Göring, the Economics Minister protested to Hitler. Hitler waved him away. He did not want anything more to do with the matter, he was reported as telling Schacht, and the Economics Minister was advised to take it up with Göring himself. ‘It won’t go well with Schacht for much longer,’ commented Goebbels. ‘He doesn’t belong in his heart to us.’ But Göring, too, he thought would have difficulties with the foreign-exchange and raw-materials issue, pointing out: ‘He doesn’t understand too much about it.’
It was not necessary that he did. His role was to throw around his considerable weight, force the pace, bring a sense of urgency into play, make things happen. ‘He brings the energy. Whether he has the economic know-how and experience as well? Who knows? Anyway, he’ll do plenty of bragging,’ was Goebbels’s assessment.
Göring soon had a team of technical experts assembled under Lieutenant-Colonel Fritz Löb of the Luftwaffe. In the research department of Löb’s planning team, run by the chemical firm IG-Farben’s director Karl Krauch, solutions were rapidly advanced for maximizing production of synthetic fuels and rapidly attaining self-sufficiency in mineral-oil extraction. By midsummer, Löb’s planners had come up with a detailed programme for overcoming the unabated crisis. It envisaged a sharp tilt to a more directed economy with distinct priorities built on an all-out drive both to secure the armaments programme and to improve food provisioning through maximum attainable autarky in specific fields and production of substitute raw materials such as synthetic fuels, rubber, and industrial fats. It was not a war economy; but it was the nearest thing to a war economy in peacetime.
At the end of July, while Hitler was in Bayreuth and Berchtesgaden, Göring had a number of opportunities to discuss with him his plans for the economy. On 30 July he obtained Hitler’s agreement to present them with a splash at the coming Reich Party Rally in September.
Hitler had meanwhile become increasingly preoccupied with the looming threat, as he saw it, from Bolshevism, and with the prospect that the mounting international turmoil could lead to war in the nearer rather than more distant future. Whatever tactical opportunism he deployed, and however much he played on the theme for propaganda purposes, there is no doubt that the coming showdown with Bolshevism remained – as it had been since the mid-1920s at the latest – the lodestar of Hitler’s thinking on foreign policy. In 1936, this future titanic struggle started to come into sharper focus.
After meeting the Japanese ambassador in Berlin early in June, Hitler repeated his view that deepening conflict was on the way in the Far East, though he now thought that Japan would ‘thrash’ Russia. At that point, ‘this colossus will start to totter. And then our great hour will have arrived. Then we must supply ourselves with land for 100 years,’ he told Goebbels. ‘Let’s hope we’re ready then,’ the Propaganda Minister added in his diary notes, ‘and that the Führer is still alive. So that action will be taken.’
By this time, events in Spain were also focusing Hitler’s attention on the threat of Bolshevism. Until then, he had scarcely given a thought to Spain. But on the evening of 25 July, his decision – against the advice of the Foreign Office – to send aid to General Franco committed Germany to involvement in what was rapidly to turn into the Spanish Civil War.
On 17 July army garrisons in Spanish Morocco rose against the elected government. The Commander-in-Chief of the army in Morocco, General Francisco Franco, put himself next morning at the head of the rebellion. But a mutiny of sailors loyal to the Republic denied him the transport facilities he needed to get his army to the mainland, most of which remained in Republican hands. The few planes he was able to lay hands upon did not amount to much in terms of an airlift. In these unpropitious circumstances, Franco turned to Mussolini and Hitler. It took over a week to overcome Mussolini’s initial refusal to help the Spanish rebels. Hitler was persuaded within a matter of hours. Ideological and strategic considerations – the likelihood of Bolshevism triumphing on the Iberian peninsula – were uppermost in his mind. But the potential for gaining access to urgently needed raw materials for the rearmament programme – an aspect emphasized by Göring – also appears to have played its part in the decision.
In contrast to the position of the Foreign Ministry, Hitler had convinced himself that the dangers of being sandwiched between two Bolshevik blocs outweighed the risks of German involvement in the Spanish crisis – even if, as seemed likely, it should turn into fully-blown and protracted civil war. War against the Soviet Union – the struggle for Germany’s ‘living space’ – was, in his view, at some point inevitable. The prospect of a Bolshevik Spain was a dangerous complication. He decided to provide Franco with the aid requested. It was an indication both of Hitler’s own greatly increased self-confidence and of the weakened position of those who had advised him on international affairs that he took the decision alone. Possibly, knowing the reluctance of the Foreign Office to become involved, and aware that Göring, for all his interest in possible economic gains, shared some of its reservations, Hitler was keen to present doubters with a fait accompli.
Only after Hitler had taken the decision were Göring and Blomberg summoned. Göring, despite his hopes of economic gains from intervention, was initially ‘horrified’ about the risk of international complications through intervention in Spain. But faced with Hitler’s usual intransigence, once he had arrived at a decision, Göring was soon won over. Blomberg, his influence – not least after his nervousness over the Rhineland affair – now waning compared with the powerful position he had once held, went along without objection. Ribbentrop, too, when he was told on arrival in Bayreuth that Hitler intended to support Franco, initially warned against involvement in Spain. But Hitler was adamant. He had already ordered aircraft to be put at Franco’s disposal. The crucial consideration was ideological: ‘If Spain really goes communist, France in her present situation will also be bolshevized in due course, and then Germany is finished. Wedged between the powerful Soviet bloc in the East and a strong communist Franco-Spanish bloc in the West, we could do hardly anything if Moscow chose to attack us.’ Hitler brushed aside Ribbentrop’s weak objections – fresh complications with Britain, and the strength of the French bourgeoisie in holding out against Bolshevism – and simply ended the conversation by stating that he had already made his decision.
Despite the warnings he had received that Germany could be sucked into a military quagmire, and however strongly ideological considerations weighed with him, Hitler probably intervened only on the assumption that German aid would tip the balance quickly and decisively in Franco’s favour. Short-term gains, not long-term involvement, were the premiss of Hitler’s impulsive decision. Significant military and economic involvement in Spain began only in October.
The ideological impetus behind Hitler’s readiness to involve Germany in the Spanish maelstrom – his intensified preoccupation with the threat of Bolshevism – was not a cover for the economic considerations that weighed so heavily with Göring. This is borne out by his private as well as his public utterances. Publicly, as he had told Goebbels the previous day would be the case, in his opening proclamation to the Reich Party Rally in Nuremberg on 9 September, he announced that the ‘greatest world danger’ of which he had warned for so long – the ‘revolutionizing of the continent’ through the work of ‘Bolshevik wire-pullers’ run by ‘an international Jewish revolutionary headquarters in Moscow’ – was becoming reality. Germany’s military rebuilding had been undertaken precisely to prevent what was turning Spain into ruins from taking place in Germany. Out of the public eye, his sentiments were hardly different when he addressed the cabinet for three hours on the foreign-policy situation
at the beginning of December. He concentrated on the danger of Bolshevism. Europe was divided into two camps. There was no more going back. He described the tactics of the ‘Reds’. Spain had become the decisive issue. France, ruled by Prime Minister Léon Blum – seen as an ‘agent of the Soviets’, a ‘Zionist and world-destroyer’ – would be the next victim. The victor in Spain would gain great prestige. The consequences for the rest of Europe, and in particular for Germany and for the remnants of Communism in the country, were major ones. This was the reason, he went on, for German aid in armaments to Spain. ‘Germany can only wish that the crisis is deferred until we are ready,’ he declared. ‘When it comes, seize the opportunity. Get into the paternoster lift at the right time. But also get out again at the right time. Rearm. Money can play no role.’ Only two weeks or so earlier, Goebbels had recorded in his diary: ‘After dinner I talked thoroughly with the Führer alone. He is very content with the situation. Rearmament is proceeding. ‘We’re sticking in fabulous sums. In 1938 we’ll be completely ready. The showdown with Bolshevism is coming. Then we want to be prepared. The army is now completely won over by us. Führer untouchable … Dominance in Europe for us is as good as certain. Just let no chance pass by. Therefore rearm.’
III