by A. N. Wilson
Hitler’s anti-Jewish mania, in all its murderous intensity, now became an open part, not merely of party rallies, but of his rhetoric in international diplomacy. On 21 January 1939, he told the Czechoslovakian Foreign Minister, ‘The Jews among us will be annihilated.’ And on 30 January, he told the Reichstag:
I have been a prophet all my life and I was mostly laughed at. In the time of my struggle for power it was in the first place the Jewish people who received with nothing but laughter my prophecy that one day I would take over the leadership of the state and with it the whole people and then among many other things bring the Jewish problem to its solution. I believe that the roars of laughter of those days may well have suffocated in the throats of the Jews in the meantime.
I want to be a prophet again today: if international finance Jewry in Europe and beyond should succeed once more in plunging the peoples into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.6
What Hitler was saying was quite clear. The words were broadcast over and over again. No one in the world could mistake them. The Jews were now being held hostage. If anyone dared put up an armed struggle against his desire for world domination, the Jews would pay the price.
Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered a pious speech denouncing Broken Glass Night but the Americans continued to insist on immigration controls and to view the influx of refugees from Germany with dismay. The shaming truth is that the international community did very little, even by way of verbal protest, still less in practical ways, to help the German Jews before the war. Sir Horace Wilson, industrial adviser to Neville Chamberlain, was one of the chief negotiators with Hitler during the tortuous series of diplomatic crises which led up to the war. At the very last hour, in the summer of 1939, Sir Horace, at Chamberlain’s behest, held secret talks with Fritz Hesse, a representative of German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop. The British offered Germany a twenty-five-year defensive alliance, and the eventual return of the German colonies, if aggressive action in Europe could cease. This was in August 1939.7 Absolutely no mention was made of the plight of the Jews. Indeed, when being interviewed in 1968 by the journalist Colin Cross, Sir Horace confessed that he could understand Hitler’s feelings about the Jews. ‘Have you ever met a Jew you liked?’ asked Sir Horace.
Western politicians, post-dating their cheques, like to suppose that the world expressed horror at Nazi anti-Semitism before the war. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq by US and British forces in 2003, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair actually stated that the British had gone to war in 1939 to protect the Jews. The truth is that the voices of public figures, such as Winston Churchill or the radical MP Josiah Wedgwood who spoke out in the 1930s against German anti-Semitism, were in a tiny minority.
What held Europe, and the world, in a state of scarcely tolerable suspense during the years 1938 and 1939 was not the fate of the German Jews, nor even the belief that Hitler meant what he said when he promised to annihilate world Jewry. It was the possibility that, as a result of diplomatic failure, Europe, and then the world, would once again be drawn into what an older generation had vowed would never happen again: war.
There were four major diplomatic crises, and in the first three, Hitler played a stylish and victorious poker game. A memorandum of August 1936, sent by Hitler to Göring, with a copy to Blomberg, the War Minister, spoke of war being inevitable by 1940. He wrote in these terms because he had been informed that Germany was running out of foreign currency to pay for imports, and in particular for oil cake, needed by the Ministry of Agriculture, and oil and rubber, needed for military purposes. On 4 September the Cabinet was told, ‘the Plan is based on the assumption that war with Russia is inevitable’.8
There was never any doubt in Hitler’s mind that the conquest of Eastern Europe, and the invasion of Russia, was the Napoleonic end which would set a seal upon his greatness. Although in 1939 Germany would sign a pact with the Soviet Union to carve up Poland between them, Hitler having the German-speaking area adjacent to Danzig (present-day Gdansk), and Stalin having the Slavic-speaking regions to the east, Hitler had no intention of preserving a long-term alliance with Stalin, much as he admired the brutality of Stalin as a leader. His assurances to Stalin of friendship and brotherhood were as trustworthy as his promises in 1923 that he would never contemplate a putsch, or his assurances to the German people in 1933 that he did not wish to establish a dictatorship, or his assurances to the gullible British politicians and diplomats during 1937–9 that if he were only allowed to invade this or that part of Europe, he would settle down peacefully with his neighbours. Lying was part of Hitler’s nature. It is this fact, obvious with hindsight to absolutely everyone, which gives such pathos to the view expressed by Neville Chamberlain, when he had visited the Berghof to debate the future of Czechoslovakia with the German Leader: ‘In spite of the heartlessness and ruthlessness I thought I saw in his face, I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.’ 9
Josiah Wedgwood was one of the very few politicians to tell Chamberlain the truth. ‘Those who are anxious for the survival of this world, of justice, of freedom and democracy trust the German Chancellor less than ever, and quite frankly we regard those who do trust him as fools and traitors to the cause of democracy.’ 10
The four great crises concerned – (1) the annexation of Austria; (2) the annexation of the German-speaking Sudetenland – hitherto part of the new European state of Czechoslovakia; (3) the dismantlement of Czechoslovakia itself; and (4) the annexation of Danzig and western Poland, which were the former territories of Frederick the Great in East Prussia.
The Anschluss with Austria, given the nature of the times, and Hitler’s own background, was inevitable. Hitler summoned the Austrian Chancellor, Schuschnigg, to the Berghof in February 1938, and more or less issued him with an ultimatum. When Schuschnigg protested, Hitler threw a tantrum. When Schuschnigg protested that if the Germans were to invade Austria, it would mean a European war, Hitler very plausibly scoffed. No one, he correctly averred – not Britain, not France, not America, not Italy – would lift a finger to save Austria. It was appalling for Austrian patriots, Austrian Jews, the more thoughtful Austrian Catholics; but when the invasion actually happened, the German troops were greeted with an ecstatic welcome. In Vienna, outside the Austrian Chancellery, an estimated 100,000 people gathered on the night of the German invasion to cheer, and to shout – ‘Down with the Jews! Heil Hitler! Hang Schuschnigg!’ It would have been strange, in such circumstances, for the international community to rally round and ‘liberate’ an Austria which had responded in this way to invasion.
When Hitler visited his home town of Linz, another crowd of 100,000 were waiting for him outside the City Hall. Here was the town where, as a whey-faced shy boy, he had wandered about in love with Stefanie. Here he had attended the operas of Wagner with his friend Kubizek and talked of his plans to be an architect or a great artist. Here his beloved mother, Klara, had died. Tears cascaded down his cheeks as he saw the enthusiasm of the crowds. And no one who witnessed it, and contemplated in how brief a time the poor man of Linz had become a world-dominator, could fail to feel the prodigious nature of what had happened.
As so often was the case with Hitler, his own inner fantasy life had been imposed upon the world. To this extent, the Anschluss was more like a piece of theatrical direction than it was an act of war. He had begun My Struggle with a reflection upon the providential nature of the fact that he had been born as a borderer. The very first paragraph stated the need for unification. ‘German-Austria must once more be reunited with the great German Motherland: and not just for economic reasons. No, no! … One Blood belongs together in One Reich.’ A mere fifteen years before, he had dictated these words to the faithful, bushy-browed Hess, who had typed them out for all to read. And now the swastika hung over the Realschule in Linz where Hitler and Wittgenstein had be
en to school; over the Vienna Riding Stables and the State Opera. Austria, the nurse of so much great European art and literature, was in the grip of a party that burned books. Vienna, the city of Alban Berg, Gustav Klimt, Gustav Mahler and Sigmund Freud, had submitted to the party which burned books.
Such was the nature of the times. Mussolini alone among European leaders could have stopped Hitler’s advance, and he deliberately failed to do so, knowing that the German Leader’s friendship would be useful to him.
The next gamble in 1938 was a much riskier one. The Sudeten Germans were demanding an Anschluss such as had taken place with Austria. The fact that they were part of the newly created nation of Czechoslovakia was the consequence of the Treaty of Versailles, and their desire for union with the Reich was perfectly understandable. On the other hand, Czechoslovakia had been, among all the countries of Mittel-Europa, a successful experiment in building a modern industrial democracy. There were many, inside and outside Czechoslovakia, who cherished this, and who would not want the nation, new and artificially created as it might have been, to be absorbed into the Nazi police state.
Hitler had to decide two things. First was whether France and Britain would allow him to annex the German Sudetenland without threatening war. Second, if he got away with doing this, whether he could then proceed to dismantle Czechoslovakia altogether.
The British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, and his Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, were singularly ill-equipped to negotiate with Hitler. History so hates what they did, and what they did not do, that it damns their policy of appeasing Hitler as cowardly. In fact, their appeasement had something of double-think about it. While doing everything in their power to avoid the outbreak of hostilities, they were in fact arming for war. Far more aircraft, for example, were produced in Britain in 1938 and 1939 than were rolling off the German production-lines.
Edvard Beneš, the Czechoslovakian President, was a much stronger character than the Austrian Schuschnigg. He also had the misplaced hope that the French and the British would, if necessary, consider military intervention if Hitler threatened Czechoslovakia. It remains one of the great imponderables of history. What would have happened if Chamberlain and Daladier, the French premier, had moved in troops and tanks and planes to help the Czechs? Had they done so, Hitler would almost certainly have at least held back; and the valuable coal-fields, mineral resources and highly skilled armed forces of Czechoslovakia would have remained at the disposal of the Allies if or when later hostility came. Perhaps that hostility would never have come and, having called Hitler’s bluff, the Allies would have been able to look back on 1938 as the apogee of his military ambitions …
But this was not how events played out. On 15 September 1938, Chamberlain flew to Munich to discuss the problem with Hitler. They agreed that the Sudeten Germans should be given a plebiscite to decide their own future. On 19 September, the French and the British presented Beneš with a cowardly plan to secede the Sudetenland to Hitler. Before Hitler had advanced a single tank, or even advanced a paper proposition for the annexation of the Sudetenland, Chamberlain and Halifax did it for him. Hitler had played for time, hoping that they might be forced, if by no other force than shame, to honour their treaty obligation to protect Czechoslovakia. In London, Chamberlain spoke by radio broadcast on 27 September: ‘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.’ Two days later, he flew to Munich for a conference with Hitler, Mussolini, Daladier and Ribbentrop. The Czechs were excluded from the discussions. Hitler could not believe that Chamberlain and Daladier – ‘little worms’ he called them – had agreed so easily to his terms.
Six months later, in March 1939, Hitler invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia, incorporating Bohemia and Moravia into a ‘protectorate’ and installing a puppet government in Slovakia. His pretext was that he needed to quell ‘unrest’ on Germany’s frontiers.
He had now won three great victories without a shot being fired – he had annexed Austria, annexed the Sudetenland, and destroyed Czechoslovakia. There remained one more round of the poker game: he wanted the German-speaking city of Danzig.
There was really no reason for him to suppose that the British and the French, who had behaved with such cowardice over Czechoslovakia, would risk a war over Poland. And herein is the reason for anger with Chamberlain and Daladier. Had they had heeded Beneš’s call and been prepared to fight for Czechoslovakia, Hitler would have been far less likely to go on taking risks, and therefore he would have been in no position to become the master of Western Europe by the summer of 1940. But that is only one way of viewing things. And the other was provocatively encapsulated by A. J. P. Taylor in his much-hated and controversial book, The Origins of the Second World War: ‘In 1938, Czechoslovakia was betrayed. In 1939 Poland was saved. Less than one hundred thousand Czechs died during the war. Six and a half million Poles were killed. Which was better – to be a betrayed Czech or a saved Pole?’
Taylor’s brilliant-sounding paradox overlooks (a) the number of Polish Jews included in this statistic; and (b) the appalling folly of Chamberlain allowing Hitler to possess the Czech army, their military hardware, their coal mines and their steelworks, all of which could well have been enough, had it remained in the hands of Beneš and the free Czechs, to stay Hitler’s hand when it came to war.
But tempting as it is to play parlour games, history in the end only concerns what did happen and not what might have happened. What did happen is that Hitler, encouraged by his success with the ‘little worms’ at Munich, invaded Poland in September 1939. So many public declarations had been made by Britain and France that they would not tolerate this piece of aggression that even Chamberlain could not stand by and let it happen.
Moreover, Hitler joined Mussolini in the Pact of Steel, a treaty of friendship and co-operation, signed on 22 May. But the Leader’s most extraordinary diplomatic coup came three months later, on 23 August, when Molotov, the new Soviet Foreign Minister, signed a non-aggression pact with Germany. This was the preliminary to Hitler and Stalin carving up Poland. Hitler’s non-aggression pact with the Russians was totally mendacious, and it in no way suggested that he had changed his mind about invading the Soviet Union.
The invasion of Poland took place on 3 September. It was the turning point of Hitler’s life. Hitherto, since the First World War, his career had been one of meteoric ascendance. No wonder, in all his bombastic rhetoric, he felt that Destiny or Providence was guiding him. He had achieved a ‘bloodless revolution’ at home, and within the last three years of the decade, he had managed to annex, without a shot being fired, extensive territories which it would have taken the most successful military conqueror in modern German history, Frederick the Great, years of war to accomplish. It really seemed as if Providence was on Hitler’s side.
But so, too, was a huge majority of the German people. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, who spent years discussing Hitler’s character with Ernst Hanfstaengl, thought that Hitler ‘is the first man to tell every German what he has been thinking and feeling all along in his unconscious about German fate, especially since the defeat in the World War, and the one characteristic which colours every German soul is the typically German inferiority complex, the complex of the younger brother, of the one who is always a bit late to the feast. Hitler’s power is not political; it is magic.’11
When he instigated the invasion of Poland, this magic began to desert Hitler. In so far as Jung was right that Hitler enjoyed an extraordinary rapport with ‘every German’, it was in his belief that the miseries and disgrace of the previous two decades could be wiped out peacefully. The public were then prepared to turn a blind eye when Jews had their shop windows smashed. Or they actually enjoyed the cruelty. Hitler was a man who had restored the economy, brought full employment, and restored to Germany its pre-war territories in the Rhineland and the Sudetenland.
&nb
sp; When the panzer divisions moved over the eastern borders towards Danzig, the crowds in Berlin were shocked. The outbreak of the First World War had been greeted in all the capitals of Europe with cheering and patriotic enthusiasm. Hitler himself was captured on camera among the cheering crowds in Munich in 1914. The outbreak of war in 1939 was received in Berlin with stunned dread and silence. There were no cheering crowds. The magic departed at that hour.
Hitler had offered his people tremendous simplicities – revenge for the Treaty of Versailles, Lebensraum, Jew-baiting, employment, a fast road and a little car for every God-fearing kleinbürgerlich family in the Reich. It was a winning formula for as long as the sons and fathers of the Reich did not have to risk their lives in battle.
There had always been another Hitler, of course, as well as the man that Gertrude Stein in 1937 had deemed worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize.12 That was the Wagnerian mystic who inhabited the strange mythologies of Germanic legend, the stories which ended with the dragon unleashed, the great World-Tree Yggdrasil pulled to the ground, and the fortress of the Gods themselves, Valhalla, reduced to a flaming ruin.
On the eve of war, Hitler visited his old friend Winifred Wagner and attended a performance of The Valkyrie at the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. Winifred had been one of Hitler’s loyal supporters from the beginning, and she would never waver in her devotion. But this was, as it happened, one of the last evenings the old friends spent together. The British Ambassador, Sir Nevile Henderson, was also, on 30 July 1939, attending The Valyrkie and Winifred Wagner, British by birth, German in spirit, implored Hitler to share a box with him. Hitler replied that he could not allow himself to be compromised. The Ring Cycle was completed on 2 August, when Hitler saw Götterdämmerung. The singer Marta Fuchs, in the reception afterwards, asked him in her Swabian accent – ‘You ain’t goin’ to make war, are you, my Leader?’ ‘You can believe me, Frau Fuchs, there will be no war’, said Hitler.13