1938: Hitler's Gamble

by MacDonogh, Giles

  The Sudeten Party leader, Henlein, was still charged with the role of refusing any offer that might alleviate the position of the German minority. The German government was not officially involved. Hitler wanted the boil to get bigger so that he could lance it about the time of the Nuremberg Rally in September. The British were losing sympathy with the Czechs and sent the former President of the Board of Trade, Lord Runciman, to investigate. Beneš was urged to make concessions to the Sudetenländer on the basis of Henlein’s Karlsbad Programme.

  Hitler was also watching the Russians. He asked the Romanians to refuse them permission to cross their frontiers to intervene, and was pleased to hear from his ambassador in Warsaw that the Poles had no intention of accommodating the Soviet Union either; the Polish Foreign Minister, Colonel Jozef Beck, still had his eyes on Teschen. Hitler hoped that the British and the French would be reluctant to act in concert with the Soviet Union. He was unimpressed by the Hungarians dithering about committing themselves. ‘He who wants to sit at table must at least help in the kitchen.’39

  Hitler’s plans alarmed his Chief of Staff, General Ludwig Beck, who feared an ‘adventure’ of this sort would lead to war with the Western powers. To the military planners, the idea of an attack on Czechoslovakia would result in a heavy risk that Germany would be dragged once again into world war. It was a view largely shared by Göring, who was now losing his kudos as a foreign policy advisor. Beck wrote a series of memoranda beginning on 5 May, in which he tried to bring Brauchitsch over to his way of thinking. The memoranda were written for Hitler too, but Brauchitsch did not even dare show him the more contentious parts. Hitler already believed the General Staff were sabotaging his plans.40

  To delay the powerful French army, Hitler was building a counterpart to the Maginot Line along Germany’s western border with bunkers and pillboxes to his own design. Annoyed by the military’s vacillating attitude, he removed responsibility for the West Wall’s construction from the army, assigning it to Fritz Todt’s Nazi labour organization instead. He was fed up with the army getting in the way. Göring demonstrated that the Luftwaffe was made of sterner stuff by creating an Air Defence Zone behind the wall and arming it with anti-aircraft guns. Goebbels was authorized to launch a propaganda offensive to show how miserably treated the Sudetenländer were and fill the papers with atrocities carried out by the Czechs against ethnic Germans.

  Beck’s reaction to the service chiefs’ meeting of the 28th was to pen two more memos on 29 May and 3 June. He was little concerned about legitimacy; he was worried that Germany would ultimately lose a war against the British and the French and was aware that the United States was prepared to back them. These doubts were shared by Göring, but despite this he was busy producing weapons at such a rate that he had set off an arms race with the Western powers. It was obvious to intelligence men in France and Britain that these countries were being seen as potential enemies in a future conflict caused by German aggression towards Czechoslovakia. Göring had ordered 7,000 Ju 88s, medium-range bombers capable of hitting targets in France and Britain. He had turned over half the workforce of the aeronautics industry to their manufacture, but progress was still slow. Germany also had an alarmingly low supply of explosives, with production at only half the total for 1918. On 12 July a New Military Economic Production Plan was launched, which placed the German economy on a war footing.41

  Göring was in a quandary: on the one hand he wanted to prevent a war against France and Britain that in the long run Germany was likely to lose; on the other he was desirous of getting his hands on Czech goods that would be a considerable boon to the Four Year Plan. There was an added incentive in the massive Skoda arms firm, which was producing some of the most technically advanced weaponry in Europe, including the famous Bren gun beloved of the British Army. In the summer of that year all he could say was, ‘Ways will be found,’ as it became increasingly clear that Germany was on the brink of economic collapse. Even the timing of Operation Green reflected this: the deadline allowed for the bringing in of the harvest, as food stocks were low too.42 It was not for nothing that Göring was overjoyed later that year, when the West allowed Germany to make off with the Sudetenland without a fight: it was all he wanted, and without the war that he did not believe Germany could win.

  Hitler rightly perceived that the British were unlikely to produce the only winning card they had and enlist the support of the Soviet Union. They detested it even more than Nazi Germany, but, together with France, it was a guarantor of Czechoslovakia’s independence. On 13 June the top army commanders had their own meeting at Barth in Pomerania. For the first time they were informed of Hitler’s designs on Czechoslovakia. Hitler arrived late. He may have been less sure of his moves than he seemed to others in his camp, Goebbels in particular. He assuaged his generals by telling them the Fritsch business had been a mistake, that the general was innocent. Goebbels thought this would be a humilation for Himmler, since the Gauleiter of Berlin evidently did not know of Göring’s involvement.43 No one objected to Hitler’s wider plans, agreeing they were not as unfeasible as some had suggested. Beck was absent from the meeting.

  The Chief of the General Staff was not the only one who was fruitlessly badgering Hitler. No one seemed to be able to talk sense to him. The Minister of Finance, the former Rhodes Scholar Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, asked for an audience with the Führer to alert him to the disastrous state of the economy. He had to content himself with writing him a memo. In the second quarter of the year the stock market went down 13 per cent. Beck’s lamentations also went increasingly unheeded. On 16 July he made his famous call for the senior officers to resign en masse: ‘Extraordinary times require extraordinary measures.’ On 29 July he produced a formula for Brauchitsch:

  The Commander in Chief of the Army, together with the most senior commanding generals, regret that they cannot assume responsibility for the conduct of a war of this nature without carrying a share of the guilt for it in the face of the people and of history. Should the Führer, therefore, insist on the prosecution of this war, they hereby resign from their posts.44

  Brauchitsch kept the memo back, and only had it read out at a meeting of the generals on 4 August. While many agreed that Germany could not win a war against the Western powers, no one heeded his call. The Nazi Reichenau suggested that such ideas would have a negative effect on Hitler, while another general thought that political decisions should be left to politicians. Gerd von Rundstedt drew attention to the February crisis, and thought a challenge to Hitler inopportune. Erich von Manstein thought Beck should stop worrying about politics and get on with his job. Beck went out into the wilderness on his own. Nor was Brauchitsch thanked for his work. When he passed on Beck’s memorandum through a third party, Hitler summoned him to the Berghof and subjected him to a tongue-whipping in his study that was so loud that its contents were heard by those assembled on the terrace outside. He would not accept political advice from others: he alone knew what to do.

  FURTHER TRANSPORTS TO DACHAU

  On the 24th the second Dachau transport set off from Vienna. This time there were 120 on board of whom fifty were Jews. There were further arrests from 25 to 27 May. Intellectuals, doctors, engineers and lawyers were told to report to the Rossauer Lände or the Karajangasse and bring nothing with them. There were nasty scenes when their women turned up to bid farewell to their sons and husbands. There were four transports in all. A week later a purely Jewish cargo of 500 set off, followed by another on 2 June. Ninety per cent of Vienna’s jewellers left on these transports, including Moritz Österreicher, whose family had served the emperors as court jewellers for generations. For those who had been in the camp since 1 April there was curiosity about the newcomers. The Viennese hangman Lang came, together with his assistant – he had killed Nazis, notably after the murder of Dollfuss. He hanged himself on the first night. In another account he was tortured to death before the eyes of the other prisoners.45 The assistant refused to end his life, so they ended it for
him.46

  Dachau was getting seriously overcrowded. The summer’s new arrivals sought support from the hardened men who had been there since April. ‘Comrades around me were discussing the chances of release,’ wrote Bruno Heilig.

  These men were in a terrible state of mind, which I could well understand. A political prisoner accepts his punishment as one of the vicissitudes which one always risks in politics – and anyone involved in the fight against Nazism had to be prepared for [the] concentration camp – but these men had never thought of things in that light. They had simply gone about their own affairs, paid their taxes, played cards in cafés, slept with their wives and confined their political activity to reading the newspapers. And now they had suddenly become participants in a political struggle. Utterly disconcerted, they faced their fate without understanding, and the only defence they had was their hope of speedy liberation.47

  Himmler had been inspecting the camps, and told Goebbels about them. ‘There is only rabble. They need to be exterminated, in the interest and well-being of the nation.’48 Naturally suicides in Austria rose that month: there were 143 in May and 144 in June.49 In November many of the Jews in Dachau were transferred to Buchenwald above Weimar. The purpose of these shipments was to put pressure on Vienna’s Jewish colony to emigrate as soon as possible.50

  On 28 May Schuschnigg, who had been under house arrest, was finally taken into Gestapo custody at the Hotel Metropole. He was brought to a large room on the fifth floor with ‘two heavily barred windows of opaque glass’. He was told he could smoke – for the time being. Any food he ordered was at his own expense. The hotel still seemed to function and the food was brought up from the kitchens by waiters. Sentries had orders to shoot him if he made trouble. He was denied books and newspapers. He was deprived of sleep: his light was left on and in the middle of the night there was an inspection of his belongings. Fortunately four years’ service in the First World War had steeled his nerves.51

  With his one towel he had to dust his room and clean the windows, then he had to go next door and do the same for the sentries: empty their buckets and basins and clean the lavatory after they had made a mess of it – again with his towel. Then the charwoman came to do the job all over again. One guard, known as ‘the Stinker’, used to amuse himself by aiming his gun at him. It appeared that these performances were revenge for the way that Nazis had been treated at Wöllersdorf and in the Corporate State’s prisons. With time the guards relented and became reasonably friendly. They told him that he was to be tried for calling in the French and arming the communists; but if he was for the high jump, that was nothing to what was going to happen to ‘the Jew’ Louis Rothschild, who was occupying another room on that floor.52

  Goebbels had been thinking about music. A Degenerate Music exhibition was planned to upstage the art exhibition of the year before. It struck him as too flat. He told Severus Ziegler to go away and redo it. He had to soothe Lehár’s nerves, not least because Hitler’s favourite composer was still worried about his Jewish wife. Meanwhile Germany was now rid of its Jewish plague, and Aryan composers could show how good they were, unencumbered by Jewish competition. He went off to see Nico Dostal’s opera Extrablätter. On 28 May Düsseldorf’s Music Week began. Richard Strauss opened it by conducting his Festival Overture and Leonora. ‘He is happy when I address a few friendly words to him. He has been punished enough.’ Goebbels felt proud to be German that night when he heard Hermann Abendroth conduct the Berlin Philharmonic in Beethoven’s Ninth.53

  6

  JUNE

  Central Europe was thawing out and swallows announced the summer. For Greater Germany’s Jews, however, there was little or no relief from their dark lodgings. In Vienna they were now banned from public parks and gardens. The only area still open to them was the Jewish part of the Central Cemetery in Simmering. From his Swiss exile, Franz Werfel penned a little poem.

  Volksgarten, Stadt- und Rathaus park,

  Ihr Frühling war noch nie so stark.

  Den Juden Wiens ist er verboten.

  Ihr einziges Grün wächst bei den Toten.

  Zur Stunde, da die Stadt erblasst

  Von sonntäglicher Mittagslast,

  Drückt es sich scheu in Strassenbahnen.

  Hinaus zu halbervergessenen Ahnen.

  Der Totenstadt von Simmering

  Sind Christ und Jud das gleiche Ding,

  Verschieden nur durch Zins und Kosten.

  (City, People’s and Town Hall Park,

  Your spring was never quite so dark.

  The Jews are banished and now it’s said,

  Their one patch of green lies among the dead.

  The moment when the city slumps

  Under the weight of Sunday lunch,

  They shyly join the queues for trams

  To pay respects to half-forgotten grans.

  The Valhalla of Simmering, that is

  Where Gentile and Jew share privileges

  Distinguished only by rent and charges.)

  On 1 June, Hitler officially launched the Kraft-durch-Freude car – the prototype for the Volkswagen ‘Beetle’ that he had had a hand in designing – by opening the new factory at Helmstedt. Every German was to have his car, at a price of 990 RM, a subscription of just five marks a week. At the end of the war, a lot of ordinary Germans had paid out to receive their Beetles, but no one had had a car delivered.

  Some Jews had taken the decision to head for the big cities of the Altreich where they believed they would be safer, particularly Berlin, something that was particularly galling to Goebbels. The Gauleiter believed he had a firm ally in Helldorf, who had begun rounding up Jews at the end of May. By 1 June he had bagged 300 of them before taking temporary leave of the city. In his absence, an outraged Goebbels discovered that Schulenburg had taken it upon himself to behave like the Tailor of Gloucester and let all but six mice go, retaining only those who were suspected of criminal activity. ‘You little bureaucrat!’ Goebbels harangued him on the telephone. He was so angry that Schulenburg had to hold the receiver well away from his ear.1 ‘I was livid. I have never made such a fuss. Helldorf is to return at once and I will give him such a bollocking. You can’t do anything with all these jurists in Police Headquarters.’2

  On 10 June Goebbels lectured the Berlin police on why the Jews had to go. He did not want them spoiling his fun a second time. Helldorf still had the reputation of being a committed Nazi and an intimate friend of Goebbels. He was playing a double game, having moved over to the Opposition at the time of the Fritsch crisis.i He later told the Gauleiter that he had purged the police, when he had done no such thing, as Schulenburg remained at his desk.3

  Other ‘old’ Reich cities began to get tough too. The first synagogue was destroyed in Munich on 9 June. Hitler had decided that it was a blot on the landscape when he had visited the new Deutsches Künstlerhaus – The House of German Artists – a few days before. The Jewish congregation was given a few hours to empty the building. In Nuremberg, the Gauleiter Julius Streicher was anxious to destroy his synagogue. He ran a picture of it on the front page of Der Stürmer in July, calling synagogues ‘dens of thieves’ and ‘Nuremberg’s disgrace’. The ‘eyesore’ came down on 10 August.4

  *

  The Reich was jubilant on 2 June: its first lady, Emmy Göring, gave birth to a baby girl, who was named Edda.ii The actress was forty-five, and her husband had been shot in the groin during the Beer-Hall Putsch, so there was talk of immaculate conception. In Nuremberg Streicher put it about that Emmy Göring had been artificially inseminated.5 There were naturally rumours that the Duce was the father, as Emmy had been in Italy with her husband nine months before.6 Adolf Hitler sent several hundred roses to the mother. When Göring came to pick up his wife and child from the sanatorium ten days later, the streets were black with cheering crowds. They went directly to show the baby to the Führer, who volunteered to be her godfather.7 He shared that office with Göring’s old comrade-in-arms Pilli Körner. Tributes came in from al
l over the world including telegrams from Lords Halifax and Londonderry. Later that month a family gathering in Berlin to celebrate the birth mustered 200 Görings.

  Little Edda had come two weeks late for Mothers’ Day, a festival held on the second Sunday in May. That year the state had decided to honour motherhood, granting crosses of gold, silver or bronze to women ‘rich in children’. Candidates were selected by Nazi block or cell leaders. The children had to be legitimate and have Aryan fathers. Childlessness was declared grounds for divorce. There had to be no history of mental illness, no dependence on alcohol and no known antisocial traits.8 The crosses were to be worn on important occasions, but mothers were also provided with minuscule replicas for everyday use.9

  Germany’s model for motherhood was surely Magda Goebbels, who had a fifth child while her husband was away in Rome in May and was to go on to produce a sixth and last in 1940. That daughter was described as the ‘reconciliation child’, as it was produced after Hitler had forcibly patched up their marriage. For the time being the actress Emmy Göring would have to play the role. For the next few months Germans could purchase postcards of Emmy with little Edda.