On the morning of March 12, 1938, three infantry divisions, a panzer division, and the supporting units of the Wehrmacht’s Eighth Army crossed the German border into Austria. Almost twenty years had passed since German soldiers last stood on foreign soil, although this time they came—and were welcomed as—an army of liberation, or at least, unification. This was the beginning of the Anschluss, the union of Austria and Germany, the first step down the road to Adolf Hitler’s dream of Grossdeutschland, the “Great Germany” which would gather all of Europe’s ethnic Germans into the bosom of the Reich.
Not a shot was fired as the dark-gray tanks and trucks rolled along Austria’s mountain roads, and if any voices were raised in anger, they were drowned out by the cheers of thousands of Austrians lining the roadsides, waving swastika flags, arms out-thrust in the Hitlergrüsse, tossing bouquets of flowers at the passing German troops until the blossoms were heaped on bonnets, hoods, and turret tops. This was a blumenkrieg, a war of flowers. It was all extraordinarily heiter, that curious, jaunty German word that compounds cheer, brightness, and festivity.
It hardly resembled an invasion, though that is precisely what it was. Called “Unternehmen Otto”—Operation Otto—Germany’s annexation of Austria, however peacefully achieved and warmly received, was an irrevocable breach of not one but two multinational treaties concluded 19 years earlier. The Anschluss violated Article 80 of the Treaty of Versailles, which established that
Germany acknowledges and will respect the independence of Austria within the frontier which may be fixed in a treaty between that State and the principal Allied and Associated Powers; she agrees that this independence shall be inalienable. . . .59
In a similar vein, the Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye, drawn up simultaneously by the Allies and presented to the Austrian delegation to the peace conference on the same day that the Germans were handed the final draft of the Versailles treaty, declared that
The independence of Austria is inalienable otherwise than with the consent of the Council of the League of Nations. Consequently Austria undertakes in the absence of the consent of the said Council to abstain from any act which might directly or indirectly or by any means whatever compromise her independence, particularly, and until her admission to membership of the League of Nations, by participation in the affairs of another Power.60
Hitler had, of course, made abundantly clear his disdain for Versailles, so it was hardly surprising that he should be ready to reduce the St. Germain treaty to just one more of those “scraps of paper” of which the Germans had become so fond. Almost from the moment that he was certain the French had conceded the fait accompli of the remilitarized Rhineland, Hitler systematically bluffed, bullied, threatened, and lied to the Austrian chancellor, Kurt Schuschnigg, in order to create the precise circumstances which would allow the Wehrmacht to march into Austria and be greeted with a nationwide celebration. It was gangster diplomacy, pure and simple, and through it Hitler was able to add Austria to the German Reich without so much as a single shot being fired by either side.
Erwin Rommel played no part in the Anschluss operations: he was still dividing his time between his duties as an instructor at the Staff College in Potsdam and trying to make a go of the Wehrmacht liaison with the Hitler Youth. The Anschluss would have a considerable effect on his next posting, however. His promotion to oberst (colonel) went up on August 1, 1937; a year later he was named the commandant of the Theresian War Academy at Wiener Neustadt, just outside of Vienna. The annexation also seems to have encouraged him to be more open in acknowledging his regard for Hitler. Rommel would always find the Nazis as a whole repugnant, however well he might get on with individuals who happened to be Party members or functionaries; Hitler, however, he saw as somehow standing apart from and above the Party and its various apparati. Though hardly inexplicable—Hitler was striving mightily these days to present himself to Germany and the world at large as a statesman, for whom the bigoted, violent rantings in Mein Kampf were left behind, the products of a passionate patriot caught up in turbulent times now past—it was certainly naive, particularly for a man of Rommel’s intelligence. Unquestionably Hitler’s charisma had worked its magic on Rommel, just as it had, and would continue to do, on so many Germans who encountered Hitler face-to-face. It was also a charm which would continue to be spellbinding long after its bearer had morphed into a creature which bore little to no resemblance to the national leader to whom Rommel had sworn personal allegiance. But in 1938, it was still remarkably potent and still bore some passing resemblance to reality.
There were small, superficial changes in Rommel’s habits which gave evidence of his shifting attitude—he would frequently close his letters with “Heil Hitler!” for example—but more unsettling were the increasingly uncritical nature of his admiration for Hitler, and the bits and pieces of Party jargon that began creeping into his vocabulary. In a confidential report submitted to Berlin following a series of speaking engagements he undertook at the invitation of the Swiss army, he noted that “The young [Swiss] officers, particularly expressed their sympathies with our New Germany. Individuals among them also spoke with remarkable understanding of our Jewish problem.”61
Germany did have a Jewish problem, just as did France, Poland, Belgium, Hungary, and, to a lesser extent, Great Britain. The problem, however, was not the Jews themselves, but rather how they were regarded in their own homelands by their own countrymen. Centuries of teaching by Catholics and Protestants alike that the Jews had put to death Jesus Christ stigmatized an entire people, while the common view held that, because Jews often lived in closed communities, distinct and separate from the surrounding Gentiles, the Jews regarded themselves as a superior people—conveniently ignoring the fact that they “lived apart” because they had been forcibly segregated by secular or Church decree. No amount of fidelity, courage, or assimilation could ever completely put to rest the belief that Jews felt a greater loyalty to themselves as a people than they did to the nations and states where they were born, lived, worked, and died. A people so regarded make easy and convenient targets for angry men and women seeking scapegoats on which blame for their own sufferings can be laid. Angry people are rarely rational and considerate—they are, however, easily misled and manipulated by demagogues and charlatans. Such were the Germans in the 1920s and early 1930s, and Erwin Rommel, who was a rational and considerate man, was not entirely immune to the passions that were swirling about the Fatherland during those years. There is a wealth of evidence demonstrating that Rommel thought the Nazis racial and ethnic dogmas and doctrines so much rubbish, and yet even he could not escape expressing himself in the idiom of the times, hence his reference to the “Jewish problem.” He would do nothing in the whole of his military career to directly aid and abet the Nazis in carrying out their racial crimes, their genocides, their reign of terror. But that does not mean that Erwin Rommel was entirely innocent.
For where Rommel did aid and abet Hitler and the Nazis, however indirectly, was in countenancing first the Anschluss, followed by the annexation of the Sudentenland six months later, and the occupation of the rump of Czechoslovkia six months after that. While these acts cannot be equated with the crimes against humanity as a whole that were later perpetrated by the Third Reich, they were crimes nonetheless. Rommel and his fellow officers aided and abetted Hitler and his henchmen in the casual, almost contemptuous demolition of the entire edifice of international law, of dealings in good faith between statesmen, of solemn agreements among nations being accorded the same weight and gravity as national law. The enabling acts passed by the Reichstag had rendered the German constitution impotent, the rule of law within the Reich meaningless; little wonder then that the Nazis were convinced that outside the Reich international covenants and conventions could be dismissed with an equal lack of regard and a commensurate ease. Crimes against nations became commonplace, even trivial; from there it was an almost trivial step to the commission of crimes against humanity.
It co
uld be argued, reasonably if not compellingly, that Hitler, in abrogating the specific articles of the Versailles treaty which limited the size and scope of the German armed forces, forbad conscription, and prohibited the possession of any advanced armaments, was merely casting aside restrictions on Germany’s internal policies which the Allies had no real right, moral or legal, to impose in the first place. It could be further argued that remilitarizing the Rhineland was a rightful assertion of sovereignty over territory that had never ceased to legally be a part of Germany. Given that there had been a strong groundswell of support in a truncated Austria for the idea of a union with Germany in the weeks and months following the Armistice, a case could even be made, although it would be significantly weaker in its moral authority, that with the Anschluss Hitler was merely carrying out the will of the German and Austrian people. But what happened next was, beyond question, a crime, one that no degree of rationalization or pettifogging could excuse or disguise: the rape of Czechoslovakia.
When Hitler vowed to gather all of Europe’s ethnic Germans into the Fatherland, his pledge was taken to be as much an exercise in rhetoric as statement of intent. Not so: he was speaking literally. Once Austria was comfortably absorbed into the Reich, Hitler turned his attentions to Czechoslovakia, and in particular the lands that shared a common border with Germany, collectively known as the Sudetenland. The Sudetenland, which was more of a geographical notion than a defined region, had never been part of the German Empire: it had been ruled by the House of Hapsburg since the early sixteenth century. When the Allies carved up the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the Great War and created the state of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland was incorporated into the new nation. Through a carefully stage-managed campaign of propaganda, intimidation, bluster, and threats of war, Hitler altered the world’s perception of the Sudetenland from that of a region where the inhabitants had for the past 18 years been living prosperously and contentedly in their new homeland, into a hotbed of ethnic dissention and rebellion on the verge of a civil war. He then systematically browbeat the prime ministers of Great Britain and France, Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier, into consenting to a German annexation of the region, without either of them so much as asking for the Czechoslovakian government’s permission to do so.
In the fantastically complex psychology of Adolf Hitler, the lust for vengeance was one of its most powerful compulsions. Czechoslovakia represented nearly everything that he hated most deeply: the bastard child, as he saw it, of Versailles, Czechoslovakia was a prosperous popular republic where its Jewish population was a loyal, integral part of the national fabric. By its very existence Czechoslovakia gave the lie to nearly the whole of Nazi dogma, therefore that existence could not be tolerated. As such, then, the little country cried out to be, in one of Hitler’s favorite words, “zerschlagen” (“smashed”) in an act of vengeance for violating what Hitler believed should have been the natural order of things.
The Czechs, for their part, had long been suspicious of Hitler and the Nazis, and had constructed a belt of strong fortifications along the Czech-German border which, once manned by their well-armed and well-trained army, would have readily repulsed any military incursion by Hitler’s newfangled Wehrmacht. In order to neutralize those defenses, Hitler manufactured the Sudetenland Crisis of the autumn of 1938, probably the single most perfect expression of his calculated cynicism. By annexing the Sudetenland, Germany would take over those border fortifications, leaving the rest of Czechoslovakia essentially defenseless. The fate of the Sudeten Germans was of little or no real interest or consequence to Hitler: they were merely tools, the means by which he would effect the obliteration of a country which he felt had no right to exist.
On the last day of September 1938 Hitler met with Chamberlain and Daladier at Munich, where they assured him that Britain and France would forego their treaty commitments to defend Czechoslovakia, and the Führer in turn reassured them that he had no further territorial ambitions in Europe. Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht into the Sudetenland the next day; by 10 October all of the contested districts were occupied. Then followed almost six months of relative calm, but on March 10, 1939, Hitler presented the Czech government with an ultimatum: accept the forcible incorporation of what remained of Czechoslovakia into the Reich as a protectorate, or face immediate invasion. To sweeten the pot, Hitler offered to give the Luftwaffe permission to indiscriminately bomb Prague. The Czechs had no choice: abandoned by their erstwhile allies, shorn of their defenses, with openly hostile neighbors to the north and south in Poland and Hungary, their situation was hopeless. They acceded, and on March 15 Hitler drove triumphantly into Prague.
Erwin Rommel was still commandant at the Theresian War Academy when the German Army marched into the Sudetenland. He still enjoyed being an instructor and overseeing the training of young officers, while his domestic life with Lucie and Manfred was pleasantly uneventful. He was not ignorant of the Sudetenland Crisis—no officer of the Wehrmacht could be—but he was sufficiently removed from the events as to not immediately be touched by them. But when Hitler arrived in Prague and announced his intention to drive straight into Hradcany Castle, the seat of the Czech government in the heart of the city, Rommel could not distance himself from the events, as he was there right beside der Führer, in command of Hitler’s personal escort.
No one has ever been able to explain how or why Adolf Hitler took a personal interest in the career of Erwin Rommel. True, they were both veterans of the Great War, where each had repeatedly demonstrated his personal courage under fire. (Hitler, a gefreiter—corporal—had been awarded not only the Iron Cross Second Class, the usual decoration for bravery in combat given to non-commissioned officers, but also the Iron Cross First Class, which was almost exclusively reserved for officers.) But there were other officers who had also proven their courage under fire, contemporaries of Rommel, such as his one-time rival Ferdinand Schörner, who would ultimately prove himself to be a sycophantic toady. The Hitler Youth military training program had been a failure, in no small part because Rommel was unable to get on with Baldur von Schirach, one of Hitler’s favorites, hardly a recommendation. At the same time, Rommel was well known throughout the Wehrmacht for his disdain for aristocratic stuffed-shirt officers, a contempt Hitler shared. In the end it may have been nothing more than a case of the biter bit, Hitler for once being charmed by this charismatic infantry colonel.
Whatever the precise details may have been, Rommel was detached from the Theresian Academy and placed in command of the Führer’s escort when Hitler entered Prague. Hitler, who had a flair for heavy-handed showmanship, wanted to drive straight to the gates of the Hradcany, making an emphatic statement as to the totality of Czech subjugation. The SS, including Himmler, were aghast at the idea, fearing for Hitler’s safety, but General Erich Hoepner, commander of the XVI Panzer Corps, urged Hitler to make the gesture. When Hitler hesitated, Rommel barked at him to “Get in an open car, and drive straight to the Castle!” just as he would have done himself. A week later, the political melodrama in Prague concluded, Rommel was back in Wiener Neustadt.62
The Western democracies, France and Great Britain, had not bestirred themselves in the slightest to save what had been left of Czechoslovakia when Hitler delivered his ultimatum, and the Führer was certain now that he had the measure of those who would have been his enemies—henceforth he would have a free hand in Central Europe, for it seemed perfectly clear now that there was nothing east of the Rhine for which the French or the British would be willing to go to war. Indeed, during the Munich Crisis, Neville Chamberlain, in a radio address to the British people, had declared, “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.” But unknown to Hitler, a line had been crossed: Chamberlain and Daladier were no longer in any mood to compromise or be compromised. Both were statesmen of the old school, when a national leader’s given word was
binding. At Munich both men had sacrificed an ally in exchange for Hitler’s solemn promise that he had made his final territorial demand in Europe, doing so in the mistaken belief that they were averting a wider crisis, hoping that by surrendering a few they would save many by averting another world war. In Prague Hitler had shown that he felt no more bound by his own pledges than he did by the treaties to which Germany was partner. Together France and Britain declared that should Hitler seek to expand Germany’s borders again at the expense of her neighbors, there would be a war. Hitler dismissed their new-found resolve as so much rhetoric, and set about creating a pretext for an outright war against Poland.63
“The Polish Question” had been a festering wound between Germany and her neighbor to the east since the Versailles peace conference, when Poland had been created out of what had been mostly Russian and German territory. Russia, now the Soviet Union, had been in the throes of a civil war and unable to so much as lodge a protest. Germany, however, saw two entire provinces ripped away and given to the Poles, and the German people refused to be reconciled to their loss. (The parallels with the French attitude toward Alsace and Lorraine in the years following the Franco-Prussian War are unavoidable.) The province of East Prussia was completely cut off from the rest of Germany by the “Polish Corridor,” a swath of territory carved out of Prussian land to allow Poland access to the Baltic Sea, while the great port of Danzig had been declared a “free city” under Polish administration. While the German people had cheered lustily when the Wehrmacht rolled into Austria, the Sudetenland and Czecholslovakia, there had been little real enthusiasm for open warfare, whatever Hitler might have wanted to believe. A war with Poland, on the other hand, was a different story: there were millions of Germans, many of them dispossessed following the creation of the Polish state, who would welcome an opportunity to settle a few old scores with the despised nation to the east.
Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel Page 17