Hitler
Page 60
Still, Wilson’s warnings were not lost on Hitler. In calmer mood, he had Weizsäcker draft him a letter to Chamberlain, asking him to persuade the Czechs to see reason and assuring him that he had no further interest in Czechoslovakia once the Sudeten Germans had been incorporated into the Reich.
Late that afternoon a motorized division began its ominous parade through Wilhelmstraße past the government buildings. For three hours, Hitler stood at his window as it rumbled past. According to the recollections of his Luftwaffe adjutant Nicolaus von Below, he had ordered the display not to test the martial spirit of the Berlin people, but to impress foreign diplomats and journalists with German military might and readiness for war. If that was the aim, the attempt misfired. The American journalist William Shirer reported on the sullen response of the Berliners – ducking into doorways, refusing to look on, ignoring the military display – as ‘the most striking demonstration against war I’ve ever seen’. Hitler was reportedly disappointed and angry at the lack of enthusiasm shown by Berliners. The contrast with the reactions of the hand-picked audience in the Sportpalast was vivid. It was a glimpse of the mood throughout the country. Whatever the feelings about the Sudeten Germans, only a small fanaticized minority thought them worth a war against the western powers.
But if Hitler was disappointed that the mood of the people did not resemble that of August 1914, his determination to press ahead with military action on 1 October, if the Czechs did not yield, was unshaken, as he made clear that evening to Ribbentrop and Weizsäcker. Ribbentrop was by now, however, practically the only hawkish influence on Hitler. From all other sides, pressures were mounting for him to pull back from the brink.
For Hitler, to retreat from an ‘unalterable decision’ was tantamount to a loss of face. Even so, for those used to dealing at close quarters with him, the unthinkable happened. The following morning of 28 September, hours before the expiry of the ultimatum to Czechoslovakia, he changed his mind and conceded to the demands for a negotiated settlement. ‘One can’t grasp this change. Führer has given in, and fundamentally,’ noted Helmuth Groscurth.
The decisive intervention was Mussolini’s. Feelers for such a move had been put out by an increasingly anxious Göring a fortnight or so earlier. Göring had also tried, through Henderson, to interest the British in the notion of a conference of the major powers to settle the Sudeten question by negotiation. Before Mussolini’s critical move, the British and French had also applied maximum pressure. Chamberlain had replied to Hitler’s letter, emphasizing his incredulity that the German Chancellor was prepared to risk a world war perhaps bringing the end of civilization ‘for the sake of a few days’ delay in settling this long-standing problem’. His letter contained proposals, agreed with the French, to press the Czechs into immediate cession of the Sudeten territory, the transfer to be guaranteed by Britain and to begin on 1 October. An International Boundary Commission would work out the details of the territorial settlement. The British Prime Minister indicated that he was prepared to come to Berlin immediately, together with the representatives of France and Italy, to discuss the whole issue. Chamberlain also wrote to Mussolini, urging agreement with his proposal ‘which will keep all our peoples out of war’.
The French, too, had been active. The ambassador in Berlin, André François-Poncet, had been instructed at 4 a.m. to put proposals similar to Chamberlain’s before Hitler. His request early next morning for an audience with Hitler was not welcomed by Ribbentrop, still spoiling for war. But after intercession by Göring, prompted by Henderson, Hitler agreed to see the French Ambassador at 11.15 a.m.
François-Poncet, when eventually his audience was granted, warned Hitler that he would not be able to localize a military conflict with Czechoslovakia, but would set Europe in flames. Since he could attain almost all his demands without war, the risk seemed senseless. At that point, around 11.40 a.m., the discussion was interrupted by a message that the Italian ambassador Bernardo Attolico wished to see Hitler immediately on a matter of great urgency. Hitler left the room with his interpreter, Schmidt. The tall, stooping, red-faced ambassador lost no time in coming to the point. He breathlessly announced to Hitler that the British government had let Mussolini know that it would welcome his mediation in the Sudeten question. The areas of disagreement were small. The Duce supported Germany, the ambassador went on, but was ‘of the opinion that the acceptance of the English proposal would be advantageous’ and appealed for a postponement of the planned mobilization. After a moment’s pause, Hitler replied: ‘Tell the Duce I accept his proposal.’ It was shortly before noon. Hitler now had his way of climbing down without losing face. ‘We have no jumping-off point for war,’ commented Goebbels. ‘You can’t carry out a world war on account of modalities.’
When the British Ambassador Henderson entered at 12.15 p.m. with Chamberlain’s letter, Hitler told him that at the request of his ‘great friend and ally, Signor Mussolini’, he had postponed mobilization for twenty-four hours. The climax of war-fever had passed. During Henderson’s hour-long audience, Attolico interrupted once more to tell Hitler that Mussolini had agreed to the British proposals for a meeting of the four major powers. When the dramatic news reached Chamberlain, towards the end of a speech about the crisis he was making to a packed and tense House of Commons, which was expecting an announcement meaning war, the house erupted. ‘We stood on our benches, waved our order papers, shouted until we were hoarse – a scene of indescribable enthusiasm,’ recorded one Member of Parliament. ‘Peace must now be saved.’
War was averted – at least for the present. ‘The heavens are beginning to lighten somewhat,’ wrote Goebbels. ‘We probably still have the possibility of taking the Sudeten German territory peacefully. The major solution still remains open, and we will further rearm for future eventualities.’
Already early the next afternoon, Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain, and Édouard Daladier, the small, quiet, dapper premier of France, together with Ribbentrop, Weizsäcker, Ciano, Wilson, and Alexis Léger, State Secretary in the French Foreign Office, took their seats around a table in the newly constructed Führerbau amid the complex of party buildings centred around the Brown House – the large and imposing party headquarters – in Munich. There they proceeded to carve up Czechoslovakia.
The four heads of government began by stating their relative positions on the Sudeten issue. They all – Hitler, too – spoke against a solution by force. The discussions focused upon the written proposal to settle the Sudeten question, by now translated into all four languages, that Mussolini had delivered the previous day (though the text had actually been sketched out by Göring, then formalized in the German Foreign Office under Weizsäcker’s eye with some input by Neurath but avoiding any involvement by Ribbentrop, before being handed to the Italian ambassador). It provided the basis for what would become known as the notorious Munich Agreement. The circle of those involved in discussions had now widened to include Göring and the Ambassadors of Italy, France, and Great Britain (Attolico, François-Poncet, and Henderson), as well as legal advisers, secretaries, and adjutants. But it was now mainly a matter of legal technicalities and complex points of detail. The main work was done. That evening, Hitler invited the participants to a festive dinner. Chamberlain and Daladier found their excuses. After the dirty work had been done, they had little taste for celebration.
The deliberations had lasted in all for some thirteen hours. But, sensational though the four-power summit meeting was for the outside world, the real decision had already been taken around midday on 28 September, when Hitler had agreed to Mussolini’s proposal for a negotiated settlement. Eventually, around 2.30 a.m. on the morning of 30 September, the draft agreement was signed. These terms were in effect those of the Godesberg Memorandum, modified by the final Anglo-French proposals, and with dates entered for a progressive German occupation, to be completed within ten days. ‘We have then essentially achieved everything that we wanted according to the small plan,’ commented Goebbels. ‘The
big plan is for the moment, given the prevailing circumstances, not yet realizable.’
Hitler looked pale, tired, and out of sorts when Chamberlain visited him in his apartment in Prinzregentenplatz to present him with a joint declaration of Germany’s and Britain’s determination never to go to war with one another again. Chamberlain had suggested the private meeting during a lull in proceedings the previous day. Hitler had, the British Prime Minister remarked, ‘jumped at the idea’. Chamberlain regarded the meeting as ‘a very friendly and pleasant talk’. ‘At the end,’ he went on, ‘I pulled out the declaration which I had prepared beforehand and asked if he would sign it.’ After a moment’s hesitation, Hitler – with some reluctance it seemed to the interpreter Paul Schmidt – appended his signature. For him, the document was meaningless. And for him Munich was no great cause for celebration. He felt cheated of the greater triumph which he was certain would have come from the limited war with the Czechs – his aim all summer. But when the next crisis duly came, he was even more confident that he knew his adversaries: ‘Our enemies are small worms,’ he would tell his generals in August 1939. ‘I saw them in Munich.’
Hitler was scornful, too, of his generals after Munich. Their opposition to his plans had infuriated him all summer. How he would have reacted had he been aware that no less a person than his new Chief of Staff, General Halder, had been involved in plans for a coup d’état in the event of war over Czechoslovakia can be left to the imagination. Whether the schemes of the ill-coordinated groups involved in the nascent conspiracy would actually have come to anything is an open question. But with the Munich Agreement, the chance was irredeemably gone. Chamberlain returned home to a hero’s welcome. But for German opponents of the Nazi regime, who had hoped to used Hitler’s military adventurism as the weapon of his own deposition and destruction, Chamberlain was anything but the hero of the hour. ‘Chamberlain saved Hitler,’ was how they bitterly regarded the appeasement diplomacy of the western powers.
Hitler’s own popularity and prestige reached new heights after Munich. He returned to another triumphant welcome in Berlin. But he was well aware that the elemental tide of euphoria reflected the relief that peace had been preserved. The ‘home-coming’ of the Sudeten Germans was of only secondary importance. He was being fêted not as the ‘first soldier of the Reich’, but as the saviour of the peace he had not wanted. At the critical hour, the German people, in his eyes, had lacked enthusiasm for war. The spirit of 1914 had been missing. Psychological rearmament had still to take place. A few weeks later, addressing a select audience of several hundred German journalists and editors, he gave a remarkably frank indication of his feelings: ‘Circumstances have compelled me to speak for decades almost solely of peace,’ he declared. ‘It is natural that such a … peace propaganda also has its dubious side. It can only too easily lead to the view establishing itself in the minds of many people that the present regime is identical with the determination and will to preserve peace under all circumstances. That would not only lead to a wrong assessment of the aims of this system, but would also above all lead to the German nation, instead of being forearmed in the face of events, being filled with a spirit which, as defeatism, in the long run would take away and must take away the successes of the present regime.’ It was necessary, therefore, to transform the psychology of the German people, to make them see that some things could only be attained through force, and to represent foreign-policy issues in such a way that ‘the inner voice of the people itself slowly begins to cry out for the use of force’.
The speech is revealing. Popular backing for war had to be manufactured, since war and expansion were irrevocably bound up with the survival of the regime. Successes, unending triumphs, were indispensable for the regime, and for Hitler’s own popularity and prestige on which, ultimately, the regime depended. Only through expansion – itself impossible without war – could Germany, and the National Socialist regime, survive. This was Hitler’s thinking. The gamble for expansion was inescapable. It was not a matter of personal choice.
The legacy of Munich was fatally to weaken those who might even now have constrained Hitler. Any potential limits – external and internal – on his freedom of action instead disappeared. Hitler’s drive to war was unabated. And next time he was determined he would not be blocked by last-minute diplomatic manoeuvres of the western powers, whose weakness he had seen with his own eyes at Munich.
15
Marks of a Genocidal Mentality
I
The ideological dynamic of the Nazi regime was by no means solely a matter of Hitler’s personalized Weltanschauung. In fact, Hitler’s ideological aims had so far played only a subordinate role in his expansionist policy, and would not figure prominently in the Polish crisis during the summer of 1939. The party and its numerous sub-organizations were, of course, important in sustaining the pressure for ever-new discriminatory measures against ideological target-groups. But little in the way of coherent planning could be expected from the central party office, under the charge of Rudolf Heß, Hitler’s deputy in party affairs. The key agency was not the party, but the SS.
The interest in expansion was self-evident. Buoyed by their successes in Austria and the Sudetenland, Himmler, Heydrich, and the top echelons of the SS were keen to extend – naturally, under Hitler’s aegis – their own empire. Already in August 1938, a decree by Hitler met Himmler’s wish to develop an armed wing of the SS. It provided in effect a fourth branch of the armed forces – far smaller than the others, but envisaged as a body of ideologically motivated ‘political soldiers’ standing at the Führer’s ‘exclusive disposal’. It was little wonder that Himmler had been one of the hawks during the Sudeten crisis, aligning himself with Ribbentrop, and encouraging Hitler’s aggression. The leaders of the SS were now looking to territorial gains to provide them with opportunities for ideological experimentation on the way to the fulfilment of the vision of a racially purified Greater German Reich under the heel of the chosen caste of the SS élite. In a world after Hitler, with ‘final victory’ achieved, the SS were determined to be the masters of Germany and Europe.
They saw their mission as the ruthless eradication of Germany’s ideological enemies, who, in Himmler’s strange vision, were numerous and menacing. He told top SS leaders in early November 1938: ‘We must be clear that in the next ten years we will certainly encounter unheard of critical conflicts. It is not only the struggle of the nations, which in this case are put forward by the opposing side merely as a front, but it is the ideological struggle of the entire Jewry, freemasonry, Marxism, and churches of the world. These forces – of which I presume the Jews to be the driving spirit, the origin of all the negatives – are clear that if Germany and Italy are not annihilated, they will be annihilated. That is a simple conclusion. In Germany the Jew cannot hold out. This is a question of years. We will drive them out more and more with an unprecedented ruthlessness …’
The speech was held a day before Germany exploded in an orgy of elemental violence against its Jewish minority in the notorious pogrom of 9–10 November 1938, cynically dubbed in popular parlance, on account of the millions of fragments of broken glass littering the pavements of Berlin outside wrecked Jewish shops, ‘Reich Crystal Night’ (Reichskristallnacht). This night of horror, a retreat in a modern state to the savagery associated with bygone ages, laid bare to the world the barbarism of the Nazi regime. Within Germany, it brought immediate draconian measures to exclude Jews from the economy, accompanied by a restructuring of anti-Jewish policy, placing it now directly under the control of the SS, whose leaders linked war, expansion, and eradication of Jewry.
Such a linkage was not only reinforced in the eyes of the SS in the aftermath of ‘Crystal Night’. For Hitler, too, the connection between the war he knew was coming and the destruction of Europe’s Jews was now beginning to take concrete shape. Since the 1920s he had not deviated from the view that German salvation could only come through a titanic struggle for supremacy in Europ
e, and for eventual world power, against mighty enemies backed by the mightiest enemy of all, perhaps more powerful even than the Third Reich itself: international Jewry. It was a colossal gamble. But for Hitler it was a gamble that could not be avoided. And for him, the fate of the Jews was inextricably bound up with that gamble.
The nationwide pogrom carried out by rampaging Nazi mobs on the night of 9–10 November was the culmination of a third wave of antisemitic violence – worse even than those of 1933 and 1935 – that had begun in the spring of 1938 and run on as the domestic accompaniment to the foreign-political crisis throughout the summer and autumn. Part of the background to the summer of violence was the open terror on the streets of Vienna in March, and the ‘success’ that Eichmann had scored in forcing the emigration of the Viennese Jews. Nazi leaders in cities of the ‘old Reich’, particularly Berlin, took note. The chance to be rid of ‘their’ Jews seemed to open up. A second strand in the background was the ‘aryanization’ drive to hound Jews out of German economic life. At the beginning of 1933 there had been some 50,000 Jewish businesses in Germany. By July 1938, there were only 9,000 left. The big push to exclude the Jews came between spring and autumn 1938. The 1,690 businesses in Jewish hands in Munich in February 1938, for instance, had fallen to only 666 (two-thirds of them owned by foreign citizens) by October. The ‘aryanization’ drive not only closed businesses, or saw them bought out for a pittance by new ‘aryan’ owners. It also brought a new flood of legislative measures imposing a variety of discriminatory restrictions and occupational bans – such as on Jewish doctors and lawyers – even to the extent of preventing Jews from trying to eke out a living as pedlars. It was a short step from legislation to pinpoint remaining Jewish businesses to identifying Jewish persons. A decree of 17 August had made it compulsory for male Jews to add the forename ‘Israel’, females the forename ‘Sara’, to their existing names and, on pain of imprisonment, to use those names in all official matters. On 5 October, they were compelled to have a ‘J’ stamped in their passports. A few days later, Göring declared that ‘the Jewish Question must now be tackled with all means available, for they [the Jews] must get out of the economy’.