The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  III

  In Britain and France, as in Poland, the armed forces had been preparing for war since the beginning of the crisis. The British government ordered full mobilization on 31 August and, fearing air attacks, began to evacuate women and children from the cities. Sandbags were piled up outside government buildings, orders were given for nightly blackouts, and Chamberlain began discussing the formation of a war cabinet including such opponents of appeasement as Winston Churchill. But the feverish comings and goings of late August had begun to convince Chamberlain that a peaceful solution might be possible. Furious arguments broke out within the British cabinet. While Chamberlain dithered, his Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax continued to negotiate with the French, the Italians and the Germans. The negotiations got nowhere. A majority of the cabinet, brushing aside arguments for a delay, backed the issuing of a ‘final warning’ to Hitler. On the evening of 1 September 1939, Henderson told the German government that the conference proposed by the Italians on the Polish situation, based on Hitler’s offer of 29 August, could only take place if German forces ceased fire and withdrew.195

  On 2 September 1939, after more hours of telephone conversations between the British Foreign Office, the French and the Italians, Chamberlain faced a packed House of Commons shortly before eight o’clock in the evening. He began by telling members that he had received no reply from Hitler to the final warning delivered the previous day. ‘It may be’, he went on, ‘that the delay is caused by consideration of a proposal which, meanwhile, had been put forward by the Italian Government, that hostilities should cease and that there should then immediately be a conference between the Five Powers, Great Britain, France, Poland, Germany and Italy.’ He made no mention of a time-limit for a response, no reference to the carnage and devastation now in progress as Polish troops and civilians were being slaughtered by German ground and air attacks. His equivocal words made it look like Munich all over again. But the mood in the political elite, as in the country, had changed since March 1939. The great majority were now convinced that the Third Reich was aiming at European if not world domination, and that the time had come to stop it. A wave of fury swept across the House. As Arthur Greenwood stood up to deliver the opposition’s reply, he was rudely interrupted. ‘Speaking for the Labour Party,’ Greenwood began. ‘Speak for England!’ shouted a Tory backbencher, Leo Amery. It was a sentiment widely felt across the House.196

  Greenwood rose to the occasion. ‘I am greatly disturbed’, he said. ‘An act of aggression took place thirty-eight hours ago . . . I wonder how long we are prepared to vacillate at a time when Britain, and all that Britain stands for, and human civilization are in peril.’ Chamberlain was shattered by the hostility his words had aroused. A visitor in the public gallery later described him as ‘a dithering old dodderer with shaking voice and hands’. A majority of the cabinet met informally immediately afterwards without him, appalled at his backsliding. He would have to issue an ultimatum to the Germans, they decided. Halifax and Chamberlain feared that if they did not issue it, the government would fall. Public opinion in Britain was behind firm action. As a huge thunderstorm broke over London, the cabinet met at 11.20 in the evening and took its decision. The next morning, at nine o’clock on 3 September 1939, Henderson handed a formal ultimatum to the German Foreign Ministry. Unless the Germans agreed to a ceasefire and withdrawal within two hours, Britain and Germany would be at war.197

  The Germans replied in a lengthy, pre-prepared document handed over to Henderson shortly after the ultimatum expired at 11 a.m. It asserted that all Germany wanted to do was to correct the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles and blamed Britain for encouraging Polish aggression. At noon the French presented a similar, if somewhat lengthier ultimatum. It too was rejected, amidst assurances that Germany had no intention of invading France. By this time, Chamberlain had already broadcast to the British people that in the absence of a satisfactory reply to the ultimatum, ‘this country is now at war with Germany’. ‘Everything that I have worked for,’ he told the House of Commons shortly afterwards, ‘everything that I have hoped for, everything that I have believed in in my public life has crashed into ruins.’ In the early afternoon, the news was broadcast to the German nation in a series of proclamations issued by Hitler. He had done everything he could to preserve peace, he told them, but British warmongering had made it impossible. The British people were not to blame, only their Jewish-plutocratic leaders. To the Nazi Party and its members he was more forthright. ‘Our Jewish democratic global enemy has succeeded in placing the English people in a state of war with Germany,’ he told them, and added: ‘The year 1918 will not repeat itself.’198

  Others were not so sure. The conservatives who had come together during the Munich crisis of the previous year to oppose Hitler’s drive towards war were even more appalled as he turned his attention to Poland. In various ways they tried to make contact with the British and French governments, but their messages were mixed - some urged greater firmness, others a general European settlement - and they were not taken very seriously.199 When Hitler rescinded his initial orders for the invasion of Poland, a few, including Schacht, Oster and Canaris, thought briefly that the blow to his prestige would bring him down. But they had no backing from the generals this time. The senior officers’ greater, and wholly justified, military confidence in the face of Polish opposition, their long-nurtured ambitions to deal a blow to the Poles, their further months of being browbeaten and intimidated by the Nazi Leader, and their surprise and relief at the successful dismemberment of Czechoslovakia had overcome any reservations they still had about the overall thrust of Hitler’s policy. A year on from the Munich crisis, the armed forces were in a far greater state of readiness; the Soviet Union had been neutralized; and there was in reality nothing the British or the French could do to rescue Poland from oblivion. Hitler had wanted to go to war in September 1938 and been frustrated at the last minute by Anglo-French intervention. This time, his resolve was far greater. For all the tergiversations of the last days of August 1939, his determination to invade Poland, even at the risk of a general European war, could not be shaken. When Goring, still trying to avoid a conflict with the British, suggested to him on 29 August 1939 that it was not necessary to ‘gamble everything’, Hitler replied: ‘In my life, I’ve always put my whole stake on the table.’200

  Going for broke was not something that appealed immediately to the mass of the German people. By 29 August 1939 they were becoming seriously alarmed. The mood in the rural Bavarian district of Ebermannstadt, reported an official, was ‘considerably depressed . . . Although signs of a fear of war are nowhere to be found . . . there can be no question of enthusiasm for war either. The memory of the world war and its consequences is still much too fresh to allow space for a jingoistic mood.’ The outbreak of war, added another report filed a few weeks later, caused a general ‘despondency’ amongst the population.201 Social Democratic observers concurred: there was ‘no enthusiasm for war’.202 Standing on the Wilhelmplatz around noon on 3 September, William L. Shirer joined a crowd of about 250 people who heard the loudspeakers announce the British declaration of war. ‘When it was finished,’ he reported, ‘there was not a murmur.’ He decided to sample the mood a little further: ‘I walked in the streets,’ he went on. ‘On the faces of the people astonishment, depression . . . In 1914, I believe, the excitement in Berlin on the first day of the World War was tremendous. To-day, no excitement, no hurrahs, no cheering, no throwing of flowers, no war fever, no war hysteria.’ There was no rebirth of the legendary spirit of 1914 in September 1939. The propaganda war to fill Germans with hate for their new enemies had failed.203

  Apprehension and anxiety were the commonest emotions as Germany entered a state of war. In Hamburg, Luise Solmitz was in despair. ‘Who is going to carry off the miracle?’ she asked on 29 August 1939. ‘Who is going to help tortured humanity away from war to peace? Easy to answer: nothing and no one . . . A butchery is beginning such as the world h
as not yet experienced.’204 It was, above all, fear of bombing raids on German cities that spread despondency. If anything, it was made worse by the elaborate air-raid precautions people were now enjoined by their Block Wardens to undertake. ‘ “Air-raids,” ’ said an acquaintance to Luise Solmitz’s husband on 31 August 1939, ‘ “well, it’s not so terrible if we really do cop it a bit. It will take the pressure off the front.” Is the front relieved, said Fr[iedrich], if the soldiers’ parents, wives, children and homes are annihilated?’205 Without expecting much protection from them, Luise Solmitz sewed sandbags to put in front of her windows. ‘A world full of blood and atrocity,’ she noted as the war broke out. ‘And so we enter a time that has been so dreaded and feared, a time in comparison to which the 30 Years’ War was a Sunday School outing . . . Now that Europe’s wounds have been healed after 21 years, the West will be annihilated.’206

  IV

  War had been the objective of the Third Reich and its leaders from the moment they came to power in 1933. From that point up to the actual outbreak of hostilities in September 1939, they had focused relentlessly on preparing the nation for a conflict that would bring European, and eventually world, domination for Germany. The megalomania of these ambitions had been apparent in the gigantism of the plans developed by Hitler and Speer for Berlin, which was to become Germania, the new world capital. And the limitless scale of the Nazi drive for conquest and dominion over the rest of the world entailed a correspondingly thoroughgoing attempt to remould the minds, spirits and bodies of the German people to make them capable and worthy of the role of the new master-race that awaited them. The ruthlessly thorough co-ordination of German social institutions that gave the Nazi Party a near-monopoly over the organization of daily life from 1933 onwards was only a beginning. To be sure, Hitler and the leading Nazis had proclaimed in 1933-4 that they wanted to combine the best of the old and the new Germany in the creation of the Third Reich, to synthesize tradition and revolution and to reassure conservative elites as much as they channelled the élan of their own movement into the building of a new Germany. At the end of June 1934, indeed, the demands of the more radical Nazis for permanent revolution were ruthlessly quashed in the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ at the same time as conservatives were given a bloody reminder that the Third Reich was not going to go back to anything like the old order of the Kaiser’s day.

  Yet the synthesis of the old and the new that the bloodshed of 30 June 1934 seemed to restore was in reality already being undermined.

  Unevenly, but unmistakeably, the balance was shifting in favour of the new. Unlike other regimes founded on the defeat of a Marxist revolution, such as Hungary, the Third Reich brought with it far more than a mere counter-revolution. Its ambitions extended far beyond the restoration of any real, imagined, sanitized or improved status quo. Almost immediately, the Nazi regime began attempting to co-ordinate all the major institutions that, for tactical reasons, it had not tried to bring under its aegis at the beginning of the Third Reich: the army, the Churches and business. This proved a difficult task, since the priorities of rearmament required circumspection where business and the military were concerned, while the assault on people’s most deeply held religious beliefs aroused perhaps the most open and outspoken opposition that the Nazis encountered following the suppression of the labour movement. Yet by 1939 a good deal of headway had been made. Business, initially enthusiastic about the profits to be made from recovery and rearmament, had proved insufficiently patriotic from the Nazi point of view, and from 1936 onwards it was increasingly dragooned, regimented and outflanked in a state-led drive for military preparedness that relegated the profit motive to an issue of secondary importance. Schacht’s bold, imaginative but ultimately conventional economic management was thrown overboard in 1937-8 when it began to impose limits on the drive to all-out war. The armed forces had been brought willingly under Hitler’s control from 1934, and happily co-operated with rearmament for the next three years. But as senior officers like Beck, Blomberg and Fritsch began to drag their feet as the pace of events quickened early in 1938, they were replaced, along with Foreign Minister Neurath; the remaining doubters were silenced for the moment by Hitler’s successful annexation of the Sudetenland in September 1938.

  By this time, too, the regime had imposed itself unambiguously in the sphere of cultural policy, making its views on modernist art patently clear in the Degenerate Art exhibition staged in Munich in July 1937. And it had begun to impose a ruthlessly eugenic social policy that swept traditional Christian morality aside in the search to produce a physically and spiritually perfect Aryan race. Here, radical policies were introduced from the very beginning, with the forcible sterilization of the allegedly degenerate and the beginnings of the removal of Jews from the civil service, the professions, economic life, and, with the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, the sexual life of the Germans as well. Here too, however, the pace quickened noticeably in 1938, with new laws on marriage and divorce designed to ensure that only hereditarily fit Germans were allowed to procreate, and childless couples were encouraged to split up in the interests of the race. The antisemitic violence of the pogrom of 9-10 November 1938, the subsequent final expropriation of Germany’s Jewish community, and their removal from the remaining areas of social and cultural life shared with the rest of the population, were only the most dramatic expressions of this quickening of pace. Less widely noticed, but for those it affected no less serious in its consequences, was the transformation of the concentration camps in 1937-8 from places of confinement and coercion for the remnants of the Social Democratic and Communist political opposition, now thoroughly defeated, to dumping-grounds for the eugenically undesirable, who were increasingly employed as slave labourers in heavy quarrying and other jobs designed, ultimately, to kill them.

  In none of this were the Nazis attempting to turn the clock back. On the contrary, in every sphere, their infatuation with modernity quickly became apparent. It was present not just in the design rooms of arms factories, shipyards, aircraft construction companies, munitions production lines, medical research laboratories and chemical companies. Eugenics, including forced sterilization, was itself commonly accepted by scientists and commentators across the world as the modern face of social policy. For those who espoused it, belief in the centrality of race in human affairs also derived its legitimacy from what they regarded as the latest discoveries of modern science. Modernity also took on a concrete, physical form in the Third Reich. New drugs, synthetic substitutes for petrol, rubber and natural fibres, new means of communication such as television, new kinds of metal alloy, rockets that could be fired into space - all of these and much more were enthusiastically backed by the state, through government-financed research institutes and subsidies to big companies for research and development. The public face of Nazi modernism was evident in the motorways, carving imperiously through hills and spanning deep valleys in gleaming-white, clean and modern constructions; in Nazi buildings like the Order Castles or the site of the Nuremberg Party Rally or the new Reich Chancellery in Berlin, where the latest techniques were clothed in a neo-Classical garb that was the latest fashion in public architecture across the globe. Even in art, where Hitler ensured that every product of the leading modernist movements of the day was swept off the walls of German galleries and museums, the massive, muscular figures sculpted by Arno Breker and his imitators spoke not of traditional human forms but of a new type of man, physically perfect and ready for violent action. Even the idyllic country scenes painted by the ‘blood-and-soil’ school of German artists spoke not of a return to a rural world mired in the hierarchical and hidebound past, but rather of a new order where the peasant would be independent, prosperous and proud, delivering the food that would sustain Germany in the conflicts to come. For millions of Germans, the Third Reich, with its real or planned mass distribution of technological wonders such as the People’s Receiver or the People’s Car, meant modernity and progress available to all.207r />
  Modernity was linked in the minds of the leading Nazis to conflict and war. Social Darwinism, the scientifically sanctioned principle that underlay so much Nazi thinking, postulated a world in which nations and races were engaged in a perpetual struggle for survival. Thus there was a paramount need, as Hitler and the leading Nazis saw it, to make Germany and the Germans fit for combat. As the urgency of this need grew rapidly, above all from late 1937 onwards, so the radicalism and the ruthlessness of the regime grew with it.208 Traditional restraints were cast aside. The thoroughness and ruthlessness of the Nazi attempt to remould Germany and the Germans were virtually unparalleled elsewhere. Every part of intellectual and cultural life was bent to serve the purposes of preparing the people’s minds for war. Schools and universities were increasingly turned into training-camps, to the detriment of scholarship and learning. Training camps, indeed, sprang up everywhere and affected almost every area of life, and not just for the young. The Third Reich was engaged in a vast experiment in human engineering, both physical and spiritual, that recognized no limits in its penetration of the individual’s body and soul, as it tried to reconfigure them into a co-ordinated mass, moving and feeling as one. From the outset, coercion and fear were as much a part of this process as propaganda and persuasion. If ever a state merited being called totalitarian, then it was the Third Reich.