My plan had an economic aspect and a strategic one. Economically, I wanted to make sure that we would never, ever again suffer from blockade. Strategically, I wanted to make sure that Germany would remain a world power. Not just for five, ten, or twenty-five years, but for a thousand years to come. And this was a field in which the future did not look at all bright. We could, as we later proved, take on France and Britain combined. However, in terms of size, population, and resources Germany could not compete with those two giants, Russia and the U.S. Thus to procrastinate and postpone was to court disaster.
Even a journey of ten thousand kilometers starts with a single step. The more so because, owing to our initial weakness, we had to tread carefully. That is why, in some of my early speeches as Chancellor, I told everyone that I wanted peace. They lapped it up. It soothed their worries and encouraged their hopes. As late as 1938, long after the belligerent nature of our regime and our preparations for war had become obvious for all to see, quite a few people still retained their illusions. Their eyes were open, but they did not see. Their ears could hear, but they did not listen. As, for example, when that stiff little prig, Chamberlain, returned from Munich with his umbrella, waving a little piece of paper and speaking of “peace in our time.”
Again, I have to qualify my words. I enjoyed soldiering as much as anyone ever did. But I had been through war. I knew what it is like more than ninety-nine percent of today’s “strategists.” I did not see it as some chivalrous contest. Instead, I recognized it for what it is: a chancy business for those who launch it, a brutal hell on earth for those who fight in it, and a source of want, pain, and sorrow for the fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and children at whose expense it is fought. Often, that is almost as true for the victor as it is for the vanquished. Briefly, up to a point I would have much preferred to attain my objectives without war. By maneuver, by trickery, by threats, by bluff. Wasn’t that just what I did during my first six years in power? And not without success either. But there are limits. All good things must come to an end. If only because, if they do not, they will usually take on a different character and become bad.
When I came to power, Germany was isolated. We did not have a single ally in the world. True, in 1925 we had signed the Treaty of Locarno, which stabilized the situation in the west. But that did not prevent the French from preparing for war against us by maintaining a system of alliances with the smaller countries to our east. Fortunately, at a time when they could still easily have done so, they chose not to use their forces. Instead, totally misunderstanding the direction in which military developments were moving, they focused on the defensive and started building the Maginot Line. Nor did the Treaty prevent the British, some of whom still believed France was their most dangerous potential enemy, from trying to play off the French against us, as had been the policy of “Perfidious Albion” for centuries past.
The other Powers mattered a lot less to us. As our rearmament got under way, we no longer needed the Russians to conceal our moves. So one of the first steps I took was to put an end to our cooperation—a cooperation which, hopelessly backward as they were, may well have benefited them more than it did us. For example, it enabled them to lay their hands on our 75-millimeter flak gun, whose range was almost twice that of their own primitive contraption. Russia, or the Soviet Union as it called itself, had lost vast territories in the Great War. As a result, it was quite far away and still in no position to threaten us.
Considering all this, as late as the Munich Conference in 1938, we were able to proceed almost as if Moscow did not exist. Japan was located on the other side of the world and could do little to help us. The U.S. was in an economic depression and in an isolationist mood. Here it is worth mentioning that we had a lot of trouble with the American ambassador, Herr Professor Doktor William Dodd. First, he was he an imbecile. Second, he was strongly against us National Socialists and did not bother to hide that fact. His daughter, Martha, was even worse. Running about Berlin, she pulled up her skirt for every pair of trousers in sight. She even tried her charms on me! The only ones who did not enjoy her favors were our own diplomats. They should have subjugated the girl and taken advantage of her for intelligence purposes. But no, not they; they were too snobbish for that.
The last remaining Power was Italy. In reality it was not a Power at all but merely a gaudy circus with much pomposity and no substance. For all the bombastic slogans that decorated walls throughout the country, the only real Roman south of the Alps was Mussolini himself. All the rest were mere Italians. But that was something we only learned too late. In my so-called Second Book I had written in favor of an alliance with Italy even if it meant either abandoning the inhabitants of South Tyrol to their fate or, if necessary, resettling them.
In July 1934, my plans were frustrated by some of my own over-eager supporters in Austria. They assassinated Chancellor Engelbert Dolfuss. It was a stupid move on their part. Had I known the full details of what they were planning, I definitely would have stopped them. To be sure, Dolfuss was strongly committed to Austria’s independent existence. But he was also the kind of ruler I appreciated. He had shown his mettle when, five months earlier, he put down his native Social Democrats and established a Fascist dictatorship with himself at its head. We could have gotten along with him, at least for a time.
In any event, Mussolini saw himself forced to bring troops to the Brenner in case I was planning an Anschluss. I, however, was much too weak militarily to try anything of the sort. What a triumph for him! What a humiliation for me! It was a bit like Austria’s triumph over Prussia at Olmütz in 1850, I suppose. In the autumn I went to Venice in an attempt to save what could be saved, but it was to no avail. We simply did not see eye to eye—not only over foreign policy but over the Jewish question as well. Proportionally, the Italians only had one tenth as many Jews as we did. Good for them! Yet Mussolini’s own government included some Jews. He did not like them much but decided to close his eyes to the real problem they presented. At one point he even had a Jewish mistress, Margherita Sarfatti. After he got rid of her, she wrote a book about him under the title Sawdust Caesar. To this day, how he could lower himself to such an extent remains beyond my comprehension.
Far from mending his fences with me, Mussolini joined England and France in setting up the so-called Stresa Front. This was April 1935, and the objective was to save Austria from falling into my hands. But il Duce was already making plans for the occupation of Ethiopia or, to use the name people called it at the time, Abyssinia. Eventually, his troops conquered it, enabling him to proudly proclaim the reconstitution of the Impero Romano. As soon became clear, though, in reality the war did more to reduce Italy’s power than to increase it. Abyssinia could only be reached by way of the Suez Canal, which was firmly in the hands of the English. As a result, when World War II came, they had very little trouble occupying both Abyssinia and the neighboring countries of Eritrea and Somalia. The entire miserable episode did little but prove my point about the worthlessness of overseas colonies.
But it also provided us Germans with an opportunity. Responding to the invasion, the League of Nations slapped sanctions on Italy. To be sure, since they did not include either coal or crude oil, they were not terribly serious. Even if those two products had been put on the list, the Italians could always have bought what they needed from us (coal) and the United States (oil). But the sanctions did worry Mussolini. To the extent that opposition under a totalitarian regime such as his is possible at all, they also helped strengthen his domestic critics.
Next, the Spanish Civil War broke out. Forming an informal alliance, the Italians and we fought against the Spanish Republicans and Communists as well as some of Stalin’s gangsters. And, less directly, England and France. Doing so brought our two countries together even though, operationally speaking, there was hardly any coordination between Mussolini’s “volunteers” and our men. And even though the latter thought very little of the former.
When Mussolini a
nd I met in Venice in 1934, he had treated me as a junior partner and looked down on me. Two years later, in November 1936, things had changed sufficiently for him to start speaking about the Rome-Berlin Axis. A year later, we got him to the point where we were able to ask him to come over for a state visit. When he arrived in September 1937, we pulled out all the stops to welcome him. Never in history was a foreign leader given a more cordial reception! First, I personally came to greet him in Munich, where we laid commemorative wreaths in memory of the sixteen heroes who had died in our attempted Putsch. Next, we held a grand parade in his honor. From there he went to Essen for a tour of the Krupp Works, and from there again I took him to Mecklenburg to watch the aforementioned autumn maneuvers. He had never seen anything like them, and they made a tremendous impression on him. As well they might.
He visited Karin Hall. There Göring, behaving like the big child he in many ways was, showed him his pet lion and his miniature railway system. By way of the crowning glory, we had him address a million of our people at the Olympiastadion. Unfortunately, they found his heavily accented and not quite grammatical German hard to understand. To make things worse a thunderstorm interrupted his speech, soaking his notes and causing the loudspeakers to creak and squeak. Finally, having lost touch with his escort, he was forced to seek his car on his own! Yet the better I came to know him, the more I appreciated him as a true friend. All in all, the visit was a great success. So much so that, upon turning home, he insisted that his military introduce their own version of the goose-step. He changed its name from the passo dell’ oca to the passo Romano and explained that the goose was a perfectly respectable Roman bird. On one occasion, he said, a flock of them had even saved the Capitol.
Just how successful the visit had been became clear five months later when we annexed Austria. I need hardly repeat that the Anschluss, which incidentally had been specifically prohibited by the Treaty of St. Germain, had long been one of my most cherished dreams. It was all Schuschnigg’s fault. Schuschnigg was a practicing Catholic. So stiff was he that some people thought he was dead! Having taken over from Dolfuss, for several years he did all he could to suppress our National Socialist supporters in Austria. He even put many of them in so-called internment camps, the polite name for concentration camps. Incidentally, it was not us who invented them. The English had used them in South Africa and the Italians in Libya. And that’s not to mention the Russians, who put together the largest net of them of all.
Schuschnigg’s camps may not have been as bad as ours. But the principle, that of arresting opponents without trial and keeping them under arrest for as long as was considered necessary, was the same. I responded by imposing economic sanctions. They brought the country to the brink of ruin. As early as the summer of 1936, Schuschnigg told his protector, Mussolini, that he would have no choice but to seek some kind of accommodation with us. In fact he did sign an agreement with our Ambassador in Vienna, Papen. Typical of him, Papen called it a gentlemen’s agreement. It was the first time that absurd phrase made its appearance in international diplomacy, and it proved to have a great future ahead of it. But it did not satisfy me. On 12 February 1938, Schuschnigg came to Berchtesgaden, cap in hand. By loudly calling out Keitel’s name, I bullied him a little. Then I forced him to set free all the National Socialists he had arrested and to increase the number of our people in his cabinet.
The key appointment was that of Arthur Seyss-Inquart as Minister of Public Security. A lawyer by trade, highly intelligent, Seyss-Inquart had served us well in the past. As he joined the cabinet, Schuschnigg realized that the game was up. His Austria, the Austria the Allies had built to keep us Germans apart after the Great War and which Dolfuss had converted from a democracy into an authoritarian state, was doomed. By way of a last desperate gamble, he decided to hold a referendum in which his people would be asked whether they wanted a free, independent Austria. Having acquired some experience in using referenda of this kind, I immediately realized that this was something I could not allow. On 11 March I sent him an ultimatum demanding that he resign. He did so almost immediately, appointing Seyss-Inquart in his place.
On the very next day Seyss-Inquart invited me to come to restore order. Needless to say, I was very happy to send in my troops to do so. He and I met at the Hotel Weinzinger at Linz, whose owner had given me his best suite. Strangely enough, it was decorated with paintings of naked women, including, I remember, a framed gravure of Josephine Baker, the degenerate, if well-known, Negro dancer! Entering, I kept stumbling over carpets made of the skins of animals. That was just the thing for me, who has always detested blood sports of every kind.
Only one problem remained. By this time we had grown strong enough to defy France and England, separately or together. Or so at least London and Paris, both of which were impressed by our rearmament and neither of which was exactly eager to go to war, felt. But we did not know what Mussolini would do. His attitude remained a riddle to the last moment. I cannot describe how relieved I was when Prince Philip of Hesse, who was married to a daughter of Italy’s King Vittorio Emmanuelle, and whom I was using as my emissary, called. He said that the Duce had received the news in a friendly spirit and declared that he would not interfere with what we were doing. I myself grabbed the phone and told the Prince to thank the Duce in the strongest terms he could find. Tell him, I said, that I would never, ever forget and that he could count on me even if the entire world should gang up against him. That, too, was a promise I kept.
With the Anschluss a fait accompli, two months later I paid Italy a return visit. Mussolini treated me even better than I had treated him. Rome was thoroughly scrubbed. The Italians called a newly built street the Via Adolfo Hitler in my honor. Protocol demanded that, as a head of state, I spend time with the king. I even had to share a horse-drawn carriage with him; as Mussolini pointed out, the House of Savoy had not yet discovered the internal combustion engine. I found His Majesty a tiresome little man of no great interest. All he could talk about was the number of nails in an Italian infantryman’s boot! He himself, being a midget, never could have served in the infantry. At most, he might have made a good batman. Later, I used to mimic his high-pitched laughter, much to the amusement of my associates.
There were the usual meetings, dinners, and parades. In Naples, my entourage and I witnessed a sort of underwater parade by no fewer than one hundred submarines. Not having anything of the sort, I could only envy our hosts. Goebbels, who had come along, used his sharp wit to make fun of the Italians and their uniforms. They made them, he said (quite rightly) look like clowns. Their attempts to imitate the goose-step were not exactly a great success either. But I greatly enjoyed the beautiful Italian women. There was nothing like them! And I took the opportunity to visit some of the world-famous museums in Rome and Florence. So impressed was I that I almost wished I could have restarted my life and become an anonymous young artist in Italy, wandering about and painting what I saw. What a lovely country! What wonderful works of architecture! Neither London nor Paris, much less Berlin, had anything of the sort. Mussolini, for his part, trudged along dutifully enough. But I did not feel that he really appreciated the opera or the plastic arts, for that matter. With his jutting jaw, on some of the photographs Hoffmann took on that occasion, he looks almost like an orangutan! That very month we signed an offensive alliance which obliged each signatory to join the other in case of war. There was also a clause in which we promised that, fighting shoulder to shoulder, neither of us would make peace without the other’s consent.
Mussolini called it the Pact of Steel. Ever since the Abyssinian adventure, when the League of Nations had prevented Italy from importing iron ore, he had had steel on the head. Unfortunately, there were limits to what he could do to augment his country’s resources. When the time for action came in the summer of 1939, he declared that Italy was not ready. In doing so, he may well have made a decisive contribution to the Allied decision to come to Poland’s aid and to declare war on Germany. Next, he had
his experts prepare a list of all the weapons and raw materials he needed to make it so. His Foreign Minister, Galeazzo Ciano, wrote in his diary that the list was big enough to kill an ox if an ox could read it.
This Ciano was the son of an Italian war-hero (assuming there is such a thing) who had been one of Mussolini’s first followers. He was married to Mussolini’s daughter Edda, an exceptionally courageous woman whom Göring admired so much that he named his own daughter after her. But he himself was a worthless fellow. A sharp dresser, slick, suave, all talk—gossip, really—and no action. Except in bed. Accompanying the Duce in 1937, he used this opportunity as well as subsequent ones to visit Berlin’s most expensive brothels. Or so Heydrich, who had set up a special one for the purpose and provided it with hidden microphones, claimed. His idea of showing his martial qualities was to shoot rabbits! During the Anschluss he tried to steer the Duce into mending his fences with England so as to form a united front against us. In July 1943 he took a central part in the conspiracy that brought Fascism down. A year later, at my insistence, the Duce had him tried for treason and executed. Unfortunately, Ciano’s diary, or rather the heavily “edited” version of it he left behind, had been taken by Edda, who smuggled it into Switzerland. Later, it was published, providing historians with lots of unsubstantiated gossip about the Duce and me.
Up to this point I had achieved all my foreign policy aims. Not only had I done that without bloodshed, I should add, but I had done so without making too many enemies among the Great Powers. Even Churchill, speaking in Parliament, said, “I have always said that if Great Britain were defeated in war, I hoped we should find a Hitler to lead us back to our rightful position among the nations.” Impressed by my successes, America’s right-wing Time magazine appointed me its 1938 “Man of the Year.” The one important objective that remained beyond my reach was the forming of an alliance with England. Whatever some of my countrymen might feel, I myself had never been anti-English. I did not repeat the words of the popular song, God Punish England. I had fought them in 1914-18 and learned to respect their qualities. They were courageous, cold blooded, and tough. And they knew how to put on airs. 100 percent pure pomposity! As I said in both my books, I saw them as our racial cousins. I would have liked few things better than to draw them to our side. Combining their fleet with our army, we could hold our own against both Russia and America and win.
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