The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  By this time, too, France’s position in Europe had been dramatically weakened, making an alliance seem less attractive to the Italians anyway. The British and French had not seen eye to eye over the response to the Ethiopian War. Internal political upheavals in France that culminated in the electoral victory of the Popular Front in May 1936 seemed to have focused the attention of French politicians on the domestic scene. The international community had displayed a complete inability to curb Italian imperialism. And the Italian rapprochement with Germany had increased Germany’s freedom of action. All these factors came together to convince Hitler that France and Britain would not try to prevent the German army marching into the Rhineland. The western part of Germany still remained a demilitarized zone according to the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles even after the departure of the Anglo-French occupying forces at the end of the 1920s. Hitler had got away with quitting the League of Nations. He had got away with announcing German rearmament. And the domestic situation in Germany was so bad in the spring of 1936, with food shortages, worsening conflict with the Catholic Church and general grumbling and discontent, that a diplomatic coup was badly needed to cheer people up. Hitler had already obtained assurances from the army leadership that it could be done. They agreed that it was necessary to establish proper defences in the West. Nevertheless, Blomberg and the leading generals were extremely nervous, realizing that the army was still no match for the French should they choose to act. Even Hitler hesitated, knowing full well the risk he was taking. By the beginning of March, encouraged at every juncture by Ribbentrop, he had made up his mind. The forthcoming ratification of the Franco-Soviet Pact by the French Chamber of Deputies would provide the pretext. The German army units who marched into the Rhineland would be reinforced by police units to make them seem more numerous than they really were. The whole operation would be prepared in the utmost secrecy, with troops moving into their pre-arranged positions overnight. Even the cabinet would not be told until the last minute.44

  On Saturday 7 March 1936, Hitler appeared in the Reichstag, summoned at short notice to a noontide session in the Kroll Opera House. As he rose to speak, unknown to the deputies, German troops had already been marching into the demilitarized zone since dawn; at one o’clock in the afternoon they reached the river itself. Hitler began with a tirade against Bolshevism. Yet, he went on, the French had recently signed a pact with the Soviet Union, and ratified it on 4 March. In view of this, he told the Reichstag, Germany no longer felt bound by the Locarno Pact of 1925, which had regulated its relations with France. The American journalist William L. Shirer, who was present, observed the hysterical scenes that followed: Now the six hundred deputies, personal appointees all of Hitler, little men with big bodies and bulging necks and cropped hair and pouched bellies and brown uniforms and heavy boots, little men of clay in his fine hands, leap to their feet like automatons, their right arms upstretched in the Nazi salute, and scream ‘Heil’s’ . . . Hitler raises his hand for silence . . . He says in a deep, resonant voice: ‘Men of the German Reichstag!’ The silence is utter. ‘In this historic hour, when in the Reich’s Western provinces German troops are at this minute marching into their future, peace-time garrisons, we all unite in two sacred vows.’ He can go no further. It is news to this hysterical ‘Parliamentary’ mob that German soldiers are already on the move into the Rhineland . . . They spring, yelling and crying, to their feet . . . Their hands are raised in slavish salute, their faces now contorted with hysteria, their mouths wide open, shouting, shouting, their eyes, burning with fanaticism, glued on the new god, the Messiah.45

  The two pledges Hitler made were, characteristically, that Germany would never yield to force on the one hand, but would strive for peace on the other. As before, he declared that Germany had no territorial demands in Europe. And he offered a series of peace pacts to reassure Germany’s neighbours. All of this was merely rhetorical. To underline the importance of the moment, he also dissolved the Reichstag and called elections, coupled with a plebiscite on his action, for 29 March 1936. His first speech of the campaign, on 12 March, was delivered in Karlsruhe, on the banks of the Rhine, a stone’s throw away from France.46

  German propaganda films and press reports showed pictures of ecstatic Rhinelanders welcoming the troops with Hitler salutes and strewing their path with flowers. Luise Solmitz wrote:I was completely overpowered by the events of this moment . . . delighted by our soldiers marching in, by the greatness of Hitler and the power of his language, the force of this man . . . We’ve been longing for this language, this firmness, as subversion reigned over us, together with the Entente. But we hadn’t dared think of such deeds. Again and again the Leader puts a fait accompli before the world . . . If the world had heard us use such language for 2,000 years - we would have needed to use it only sparingly, would always have been understood and would have been able to spare ourselves much blood, many tears, loss of land and humiliation . . . Reports of the mood in every town speak of unprecedented jubilation.47

  Social Democratic observers, however, told a different story. ‘The occupation of the Rhine zone,’ one agent reported, ‘has allegedly been greeted by the entire population with huge jubilation. But reports from the whole of the West are agreed that it was only the Nazis who celebrated.’48

  Some businessmen were admittedly pleased because they thought things would now improve for them. Most people indeed quietly approved of the remilitarization. Young people in particular were enthusiastic in some places. ‘It’s our country, after all,’ declared one worker. ‘Why shouldn’t we be allowed to have any military there?’49 But there were also widespread fears that the action would lead to war. Many active Nazis responded to them by pointing to Hitler’s professions of pacific intent. Only a few boasted that they would welcome a war.50 People were proud of the recovery of national sovereignty, but at the same time, they were desperately worried about the dangers of a general war, about the prospect of mass bombing of German cities and about a repeat of the death and destruction of 1914-18.51 The fears of the great majority were not diminished by the extensive air-raid precautions that accompanied the remilitarization action. ‘The people’, one Social Democratic agent summed up, ‘are very worked-up. They’re afraid of war, since everyone is clear that Germany will lose this war and then will go to its downfall.’52

  In March 1936, Germans held their breath while 3,000 troops marched deep into the Rhineland, backed by another 30,000 who remained on or near the eastern bank of the river. Had the French chosen to send their own troops in, the Germans would have been driven out within a few hours despite Hitler’s orders for them to resist. But they did not. Believing that the German military presence was ten times greater than it really was, and hamstrung by public anxiety about war at a time when a general election was looming, the French government chose inaction. Their position was bolstered by the British, who moved quickly to restrain any precipitate response. What had happened, after all, was only a recovery of Germany’s sovereignty over its own territory, and no one thought that was worth risking a general war. Nobody at this stage thought of Hitler as different from previous German statesmen, and these had never hidden their desire to move troops back into the Rhineland. Indeed, such was the public indifference to the issue in Britain that the government even refused to support the idea of imposing League of Nations sanctions on Germany for what was in fact a breach of international treaty agreements. Hitler had taken his biggest gamble yet, and got away with it.53 The experience, confirmed by another rigged election and plebiscite held on 29 March 1936, which delivered the inevitable 98.9 per cent for the Nazi Party and the government’s actions, confirmed Hitler in the belief that he could not fail. Convinced in the myth of his own invincibility, he now began to quicken the pace of Germany’s march towards European domination and world conquest. ‘Neither threats nor warnings’, he declared in Munich on 14 March 1936, ‘will prevent me from going my way. I follow the path assigned to me by Providence with the instinct
ive sureness of a sleepwalker.’54

  Map 18. The Saarland Plebiscite and the Remilitarization of the Rhineland, 1935-6

  CREATING GREATER GERMANY

  I

  The remilitarization of the Rhineland profoundly altered the balance of international relations in Europe. Up to this point, as had been made abundantly clear in 1923, the French were potentially able to enforce Germany’s obligations by marching across the Rhine and occupying the country’s biggest industrial region, the Ruhr. From now on, they were no longer able to do so. The French position from 1936 onwards was a purely defensive one. It left the Third Reich a free hand in moving against the small countries of Eastern Europe. Shocked by a development that left them dangerously vulnerable, many of them, previously allied to France, moved to try and improve relations with the Third Reich. Austria now felt particularly at risk, given the new-found friendship between Germany and Italy.55 Before long, too, Hitler and Mussolini’s relationship drew even closer. For, following a left-wing victory in the Spanish elections held in February 1936, right-wing army officers in various parts of the country launched a concerted uprising on 17 July 1936 to overthrow the Republic and create a military dictatorship. The uprising failed to achieve its objectives in most parts of the country, and soon Spain was plunged into a desperate and bloody civil war. German officials and businessmen in Spain urged on Hitler the support of the rebels, and one of the leading figures in the uprising, General Francisco Franco, appealed directly to Hitler for help. It was not long in coming.56

  Even before the end of July 1936, German planes were in Spain ferrying rebel forces to the key fronts and thus helping to ensure that the uprising did not fizzle out. From this modest beginning, German intervention was soon to reach startling proportions. The main reasons were both military and political. As the political situation in Spain polarized with unprecedented intensity, Hitler began to be concerned about the possibility that a Republican victory would deliver the country into the hands of the Communists at a time when a Popular Front government, backed by the Communist Party, had just come to power in France. A union between the two countries might create a serious obstacle in Western Europe to his plans for expansion and war in the East, particularly when this encompassed the Soviet Union, as it eventually would. Beyond this, he soon realized that the war would provide an ideal proving-ground for Germany’s new armed forces and equipment.57 Soon, Werner von Blomberg, the German Minister of War, freshly promoted to Field-Marshal, was in Spain telling Franco that he would get German troops and matériel provided he agreed to prosecute the war with more vigour than he had displayed to date. In November 1936, 11,000 German troops and support staff, supplied with aircraft, artillery and armour, landed at Cadiz. By the end of the month, the Nationalist regime had been officially recognized as the government of Spain by the Third Reich, and the German forces had been organized into an effective unit under the name of the Condor Legion.58

  Hitler and his generals were clear that German assistance to Franco could not expand indefinitely without attracting the hostility of the other European powers. Britain and France had agreed on a policy of non-intervention. This did not stop supplies from the United Kingdom in particular from reaching the Nationalist side, but it did mean that if the fiction of general neutrality was to be preserved, other powers would have to be careful about the extent to which they intervened. Mussolini’s assistance to the rebels was far greater than Hitler’s, but both were countered by the aid that the Soviet Union gave to the Republican side. Volunteers from many countries flocked to the Republican banner to form an International Brigade; a rather smaller number went to fight for the Francoists. In this situation, preventing the conflict from escalating into a wider war seemed to be in everybody’s interest. The stakes scarcely seemed overwhelming. So Hitler kept the Condor Legion as a relatively small, though highly trained and professional, fighting force.59

  Under the command of General Hugo Sperrle, however, it played a significant part in the Nationalist war effort. Soon the Legion was testing its new 88-millimetre anti-aircraft guns against Republican planes. But its most effective contribution was made through its own bombers, which took part in a concerted advance, undertaken at Sperrle’s behest, on the Basque country. On 31 March 1937 the Legion’s Junkers aircraft bombed the undefended town of Durango, killing 248 inhabitants, including several priests and nuns, the first European town to be subjected to intensive bombing. Far more devastating, however, was the raid they carried out, in conjunction with four new fast Heinkel III bombers and some untried Messerschmitt Bf-109 fighters, on the town of Guernica on 26 April 1937. Forty-three aircraft, including a small number of Italian planes, dropped 100,000 pounds of incendiary, high-explosive and shrapnel bombs on the town, while the fighters strafed the inhabitants and refugees in the streets with machine-gun fire. The town’s population, normally not more than 7,000, was swollen with refugees, retreating Republican soldiers and peasants attending market-day. Over 1,600 people were killed and more than 800 injured. The centre of the town was flattened. The raid confirmed the widespread fear in Europe of the devastating effects of aerial bombing. Already a symbol of the assault on Basque identity, it gained a worldwide significance through the exiled, pro-Republican Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, who dedicated the mural he had been commissioned to produce for the Paris World Exposition a large painting, Guernica, depicting with unique and enduring power the sufferings of the town and its people.60

  The international furore that greeted the raid led the Germans and the Spanish Nationalists to deny any responsibility. For years afterwards it was claimed that the Basques had blown their own town up.61 Privately, Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, who had organized the raid, concluded with satisfaction that the new planes and bombs had proved their effectiveness, though he was less than satisfied with the failure of the Spanish Nationalist generals to follow up the raid with an immediate knock-out blow to their Basque opponents.62 But the Condor Legion did not repeat this murderous experiment. Later on, its bid to use fast-moving tanks in the concluding phase of the war was vetoed by the traditionalist Franco. Nevertheless, thanks to German and Italian help, superior resources and generalship, internal unity and international neutrality, the Francoists completed their victory by the end of March 1939. On 18 May 1939, led by Richthofen, the Legion marched proudly past in Franco’s final victory parade in Madrid.63 Once more, international inaction had allowed Hitler free rein. The Spanish Civil War was one more example for him of the supine pusillanimity of Britain and France, and thus an encouragement to move faster in the fulfilment of his own intentions. In this sense, at least, the Spanish conflict accelerated the descent into war.64

  More immediately, however, it cemented the alliance between Hitler and Mussolini. Already in September 1936 Hans Frank visited Rome to begin negotiations, and the next month, the Italian Foreign Minister Ciano went to Germany to sign a secret agreement with Hitler. By November 1936 Mussolini was referring openly to a ‘Rome-Berlin Axis’. Both powers had agreed to respect each other’s ambitions and ally themselves against the Spanish Republic. At the same time, behind the backs of the Foreign Ministry, Hitler arranged for Ribbentrop’s office to conclude an Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan, pledging both to a defensive alliance against the Soviet Union. For the moment, it was of little value, but together with the Rome-Berlin Axis, it completed the line-up of revisionist, expansionist powers that was to take such devastating shape during the Second World War.65 The attempt to bring Britain into the Anti-Comintern Pact, spearheaded by Ribbentrop’s appointment as Ambassador in London in August 1936, was never likely to succeed; it foundered almost immediately on the new envoy’s tactlessness and his use of the threat of undermining Britain’s overseas empire as an instrument of blackmail - a threat taken all too seriously by the British. As far as Hitler was concerned, moreover, nothing less than a global arrangement with the United Kingdom would by this stage have been worth the price of alienating the Italians, given the substantia
l British presence in the Mediterranean. He did not abandon the idea of some kind of arrangement with the British and continued to believe that the United Kingdom would stand aside from events in Europe, however they unfolded. For the moment, however, such calculations took second place to the pursuit of his immediate aims on the European Continent.66

  II

  Those aims were moving appreciably closer to fulfilment by the second half of 1936. The Four-Year Plan, designed to build up Germany’s military power fast enough to undertake a general war by the early 1940s, was under way. The Rome-Berlin Axis, the Anti-Comintern Pact, the successful prosecution of the Spanish Civil War and the ascendancy of appeasement in the British government all helped convince Hitler that he could accelerate the pace of his foreign policy even in the absence of a British alliance. It was in this mood that Hitler held the conference with Blomberg, Fritsch, Goring, Neurath and Raeder on 5 November 1937 where Colonel Hossbach recorded the Nazi Leader’s intention of taking military action against Austria and Czechoslovakia in the not-too-distant future.67 But by this time, Hitler had begun to feel that he was being hamstrung by obstructionism and lack of enthusiasm from some of his underlings. In the winter of 1937-8, he began to replace them with men who would be more willing to go along with an accelerated pace towards war. For a number of top military leaders, backed by sympathizers in the Foreign Office, had become extremely alarmed by Hitler’s increasingly impatient drive towards war. Germany might be able to take over Austria and possibly Czechoslovakia, but the country’s state of military preparedness meant that it was in their view far from ready for a war with Britain and France should military action in East-Central Europe ignite a general conflagration. War Minister Field-Marshal Werner von Blomberg, Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath and Army Commander-in-Chief Werner von Fritsch all expressed serious doubts after the meeting of November 1937. Chief of the Army General Staff General Ludwig Beck was even more alarmed and expressed his dismay at Hitler’s irresponsibility. All these men believed that a general war was both inevitable and desirable, but they were also convinced that to launch it now would be dangerously premature.68