by David Wragg
International concerns over rearmament have to be placed in the context of the day. While the Treaty of Versailles had broken the Austro-Hungarian Empire and deprived Germany of Alsace-Lorraine and its few overseas colonies, such as South-West Africa, and limited the armed forces, other treaties had affected the victors. The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 had been a serious effort to limit the size of the world’s navies and prevent a further naval race. No longer were the British allowed to work towards a ‘Two Power Standard’, but instead had to accept parity with the United States. The French and the Japanese had to make do with less than this. The Treaty imposed restrictions on total tonnage for each of the signatories, but also gave specific tonnage totals for each type of warship for each navy and a maximum tonnage for each type. It also intervened in the calibre of armament. Here were the victors accepting restrictions while the defeated were contemplating breaching the rules imposed upon them.
The Paris Air Agreement of 1926 opened the way for resumption of civil aircraft manufacture and civil aviation within Germany. With official blessing, gliding became a national hobby, and within this supposedly innocent activity, a large number of Germans became pilots, a good grounding for later conversion to fixed-wing flying and ultimately preparing the way for the birth of the Luftwaffe.
By this time, the sea trials for the Rotterdam-built submarines for Turkey had also taken on the role of training a nucleus of submarine crews. Furbringer not only conducted the trials of the second submarine for Turkey, but delivered the submarines to Turkey and remained there with his chief engineer to train Turkish submariners. In Germany, from 1930, Rear Admiral Walter Gladisch, signed himself as BdU, or Commander of U-Boats, although no one was listed officially as having this role. U-boat training also began in 1930, using a craft designed by IvS at Rotterdam, but built in Finland by German engineering workers. German naval personnel went to Finland as civilian tourists, and conducted trials with the U-boat from July to September.
Hitler had still to come to power when important decisions were taken about the future of the Reichsmarine. In 1929, the first of a new class of armoured warship, panzerschiff to the Germans, but described by the British media as ‘pocket battleships’, was ordered. These were certainly larger than most cruisers and more heavily armed, but to describe them as battleships was misleading as they had 11-in guns compared to the 15-in more commonly specified for this type of warship. The case for building these ships was that they were to replace the coastal battleships allowed by the Versailles Treaty and which were obsolete, and indeed Germany insisted on the right to build a total of six, but in the end just three were completed, Deutschland, Admiral Graf Spee and Admiral Scheer. Shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, Deutschland had a name change to Lutzow, as Hitler suddenly considered the impact on national morale if Deutschland was sunk! That such ships could be built indicated that Germany was indeed rearming, since with their powerful, but economical, diesel engines these ships had a very long range. They were in fact surface raiders and certainly not intended to remain in the Baltic, or even the North Sea for that matter. In designing these ships, the maxim was that they should be ‘stronger than faster enemies’, in other words cruisers, and ‘faster than stronger enemies’, meaning battleships.
Whether or not the revelations about rearmament played any part, elections in 1928 saw a marked swing to the left, while the recession sweeping the industrialised countries left debt-ridden Germany in a vulnerable economic position. Just as fears of revolution had helped to harden attitudes during the years immediately before the outbreak of the First World War, these fresh fears forced many otherwise moderate people to view Hitler and the Nazis as their best hope for salvation. Many of these were doubtless people who thought that Hitler could be used and dropped when necessary; simply to overcome what they hoped would be a temporary difficulty. They were to be proved wrong.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Nazis Plan a War Machine
In September 1930, Hitler saw his party become the second largest in the Reichstag, with 107 seats. The new Chancellor, the Roman Catholic nationalist Heinrich Bruening, was confronted by an economy once again in crisis and had imposed a regime of strict austerity. While not a Fascist, his policies were acceptable to the majority of the Nazis. He denounced reparations, proposed a customs union between Austria and Germany, and an increasingly proactive policy in Central and South-Eastern Europe, with exclusive bilateral trade agreements with Hungary and Romania, and, despite the desperate financial situation, ordered two new battlecruisers for the Reichsmarine. He had earlier rejected a French proposal for closer economic relations with Germany, and in 1931 Bruening rejected an offer that the French capital markets be opened to long-term German borrowing.
Germany needed borrowing to fulfil the requirements of the Young Plan, an American attempt to stabilise the Germany economy. German reparations to France and the United Kingdom were to be offset by a linkage to their wartime debts to the United States, but while the German government would be in control of reparations and released from foreign oversight, the scope for delay in making reparations was also reduced. Nevertheless, in June 1931, the wartime Allies were forced to consider a moratorium on reparations, and a year later at a conference held in Lausanne the reparations scheme was formally cancelled. In the intervening period, French delay in approving the moratorium led to the collapse of a major German bank, the state losing vast sums in an attempt to prop up its ailing currency, and then a general closure of the German financial system and Germany being forced off the gold standard. In mid-July, a new and draconian system of exchange controls was introduced, while private holdings of foreign currency were confiscated by the state.
The Lausanne Conference was designed to resolve issues surrounding international debt, but there was also another conference, at Geneva, as a further step towards the ever elusive goal of disarmament. This was to be far less successful. The Geneva Conference resulted from an American fear that the cancellation of British and French war debt would release funds for rearmament. In one sense, there was logic to the American aims, as it followed on from earlier attempts to impose limitations on armaments, such as the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922. The American action was not unwelcome to the British, who throughout most of the 1930s, until war became inevitable, tried to lower the maximum individual tonnages for the major warship types.
It was not until January 1933 that Hitler assumed power, marking the end of the Weimar Republic. He was carried to power by an alliance with the DNVP, but a further general election had to be called on 5 March, and this proved to be a disappointment, the Nazi’s support having peaked the previous year. Considerable pressure was applied to the Catholic Centre Party to give Hitler a working majority in the Reichstag. The majority was used for the Enabling Law of 23 March 1933, which finally freed Hitler to rule by decree. Democracy in Germany was dead.
HITLER’S GERMANY
It was not just the Nazis and the nationalists who saw the outcome of the First World War as one of constant injustice. The feeling was widely felt throughout all classes of German society. In addition to the burden of reparations, the country had also lost its few colonies. Hitler was not alone in seeing colonial possessions as providing a captive market, and also space or Lebensraum into which expanding populations could move. Indeed, not only Germany but also both Italy and Japan were inspired by the need to establish empires, having missed their share of the colonial expansion of the nineteenth century, largely because Italy itself had been fragmented and because Japan had been isolationist.
Another factor that all three countries had in common was a paucity of natural resources, with Germany having massive reserves of coal, but nothing else, while Italy and Japan didn’t even have this to any appreciable extent.
One difference between the Kaiser and Hitler was that Weltpolitik was less important than securing adequate natural resources, once again Germany was looking east, but within Europe, but at first such in
tentions were kept from the world at large and simply mentioned within the National Socialist Party and the core of the future German armed forces.
Seldom has anyone been projected into such high office in a major country with so little experience of political life and of government as was Adolf Hitler. His party had been one of protest, in some ways a little more than a brutal pressure group. Inter-war Germany had had its fleeting taste of democracy, and the new national diet was to be dictatorship rather than monarchy.
Having first come to power on 30 January, two days later, on 1 February, Hitler made the first radio broadcast of his life. At the time, only a small minority of the German population had radios in their homes. Nevertheless, his first broadcast had to deliver a decisive policy address that would set the tone of his government. With a further general election looming, he had to gain the support of the vast majority of Germans at a time when popular support for his political party had passed its peak, and also encourage his own followers. While Germany was still militarily and financially weak, he also had to avoid alarming the democracies. Radio was important as his address would be taken seriously by listeners both within, and without, Germany at the time. Perhaps it was as well that television wasn’t available, for Hitler has been described as sweating profusely with anticipation and, no doubt, nerves.
Hitler’s speech concentrated on domestic issues. The recurring theme of his speech was the need for national unity. He harked back to Germany’s surrender in November 1918, and to the Communist revolutionaries that had come to the fore in the period immediately following the armistice. In the speech, and in the years that followed, the trauma of German surrender in 1918 became a recurring theme, an obsession with defeat.
Relieving both unemployment amongst industrial workers and ending the poverty of the German peasant farmers were two specific objectives promised by Hitler, as well as reforming the relationship between the Reich, and the provinces or states, known as the Lander, and local government. Given the traumatic impact of hyperinflation on the population during the 1920s, his promise to promote efficiency and economy in public services, but to maintain health care and pensions must have reassured many sceptics, as well as promising to protect the German currency. All of this was innocuous, very much a case of ‘motherhood and apple pie’, and for domestic consumption.
On foreign policy, in many respects it was what Hitler did not say that mattered more than his actual words. Doubtless aware that his words would be considered carefully by the former wartime allies, Hitler gave conditional support to the Geneva disarmament negotiations. He even went as far as to stress that he would even accept the abolition of the German army, if every other country also disarmed completely. Yet, he laid equal stress on the fact that the state’s primary duty was to protection of society and ‘the restoration of the freedom of our Volk’. Few would argue that the first duty of government is the defence of the people, but as the German people were at this time still free, the stress on restoring freedom implied a hidden meaning. Many believe that by ‘freedom’, Hitler meant the freedom for Germany to do much as it pleased, placing her own national self-interest above all other considerations. The German Volk that he wanted to set free were those living outside Germany as minorities elsewhere in Europe.
What Hitler dared not say in public at this time was contained in his message for the armed forces. On 3 February, the new Defence Minister, General Blomberg, invited Hitler to address the country’s senior military officers. The message was much clearer to this select and loyal audience. At home, Hitler’s new administration would destroy Marxism and reconstruct the economy, while preparations would be made for a rearmament programme. Rearmament was essential because Hitler was anxious lest the former wartime allies might re-intervene whenever they felt like it, while he also saw Germany as vulnerable to attack from Poland and France, the German Case A again. The fact that Poland lacked the financial, industrial and military strength to do very much, and attacking Germany was far beyond its capacity, was conveniently overlooked.
The real meat of Hitler’s address to the high command lay in his foreign policy ambitions. The concept of Lebensraum, ‘living space’, was to the forefront of his ambitions. He also called for new ‘export opportunities’, which was Hitler-speak for new colonies. By colonies, Hitler did not mean looking for tracts of Africa or Asia, at least not initially, but by expansion to the east, followed by a ruthless and single-minded Germanisation of the occupied territories that could be incorporated into the Reich and thus provide the Lebensraum that was so necessary. This was colonisation with a continental twist.
An even clearer indication of the way in which the new regime was to evolve followed on 9 February, when Hitler chaired a cabinet committee on job creation. The sole theme of the work creation programme was to be rearmament, whatever the country’s representatives might say at Geneva. ‘The future of Germany depends exclusively and only on the reconstruction of the Wehrmacht,’ demanded Hitler. All other tasks must cede precedence to the task of rearmament … the interests of the Wehrmacht must in every case have priority.’1
After the general election on 5 March 1933, the nature of the new Germany was soon apparent. A good example was that, doubtless noting the promises to relieve unemployment and rural poverty, the socialist trade unions convinced themselves that they could work with the new government. For the first time in Germany, 1 May 1933, became a public holiday, with Hitler, Goebbels and the trade union leaders joining in a celebration of national labour. The day after, the trade union leaders faced reality. On 2 May 1933, large squads of brownshirt militia stormed the trade union offices and closed them, while trade union funds and property were confiscated. At works level, there were also Nazi activists on the shop floor, but their activities were getting out of hand and becoming an embarrassment for the party, so the National Socialist Party launched a German Labour Front, which acted as a controlling organization for a regional network of ‘trustees’ of labour.
Meanwhile, members of the other political parties, including the Communists and Social Democrats, were subjected to violent attacks, as well as members of the Jewish minority, whose homes and businesses were attacked.
Gradually, Hitler’s ambitions started to become apparent to a wider audience. In June 1933, Hitler told the Hungarian prime minister, Julius Goemboes, in private, that he intended to crush France. Before that, the German government had imposed a moratorium on all of Germany’s foreign debts, to take effect from 30 June, and at the same time a massive programme of rearmament was initiated that would account for up to 10 per cent of the gross national product for the future. The initial debt moratorium was to be short-lived due to the volume of protests from the wartime allies, and payments at the rate of half the interest and capital due soon restarted, but in December these sums were reduced to 30 per cent.
Meanwhile, in response to a British initiative calling for a further round of reductions in national armed forces, and British rejection of German plans for limited rearmament, Hitler withdrew from both the Geneva disarmament talks and membership of the League of Nations on the grounds that he could not accept Germany’s second class status. It seems that if not Hitler himself, then several of his close associates, expected intervention at that time, especially from France and Poland. Both countries could have acted together and probably succeeded, but France suffered from internal civil unrest at the time aroused by its own Fascists, and Poland was placated in early 1934 by a combination of economic concessions and a treaty of friendship.
HITLER AND THE ARMED FORCES
From the start, Adolf Hitler was popular with the armed forces and enjoyed their support. The small size of the Army and the Navy had meant that it had been possible to screen new recruits and only those who were safe and without Socialist connections were accepted. This was especially true of the officer class. The support was more open and more widely felt in the Navy, with many Army officers, especially those of the ‘old school’ regarding the
Fascists and the Communists as simply being different sides of the same coin, both being revolutionaries and both ruling by dictatorship. Hitler’s background would not have endeared himself to the old Prussian elite. What both armed services had in common was support for the Nazi promise to free Germany from ‘the shackles of Versailles.’ When the President, von Hindenburg, appointed Hitler Chancellor, Dönitz recalled that: ‘We soldiers also hoped that through this change in the leadership the Communist danger would be removed.’ In fact, the Navy also saw the Nazis as resurrecting Germany’s idea of a world role as a maritime power.
The Navy also needed to embrace Hitler and in effect gain his favour. It had failed during the First World War, suffered mutinies and desertions in 1918, and again there had been unrest in 1923. The Army had regarded the Navy as being better able to handle political matters and publicity, and it was to need this edge with the new regime.
The naval bases at Kiel and Wilhelmshaven were filled with many Nazi sympathisers, so much so that when Goebbels visited in spring 1932, he reported that ‘everyone, officers and crews, are entirely for us.’
The initial plans for reconstruction of the armed forces had included plans for a secret air force. Initially, German manufacturers had continued their work abroad while gliding schools in Germany ensured that young pilots were being nurtured. In 1932, the air force was planned to have 200 aircraft, but in September 1933, this was raised to 2,000 combat aircraft, due to be operational by 1935. For the army, there were two four year plans, at the end of the first, in 1937, it was to have 300,000 men in twenty-one divisions, with adequate reserves to expand to sixty-three divisions on the outbreak of hostilities. This required conscription, forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles. Plans were laid to reoccupy the Rhineland by 1937. The Navy was not neglected, with an initial five year plan to begin rebuilding and modernising the fleet.