Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  CHAPTER 5

  1935: Collapse of the Stresa Front

  AUSTRIA KNOWS THAT she can count on us to defend her independence as a sovereign state.1

  —MUSSOLINI, 1934

  Next fall I am going to invite Hitler to…make Austria German. In 1934 I could have beaten his army…today I cannot.2

  —MUSSOLINI, 1937

  THE ITALIANS HAD come home from the Paris conference bitter, and they blamed Wilson even more than Lloyd George.

  After deserting the Triple Alliance and declaring neutrality in 1914, Rome had been bribed into the war on the Allied side by the British, who offered Rome more than Berlin could. In the secret 1915 Treaty of London, Italy had been promised South Tyrol, Istria, Trieste, northern Dalmatia, most of the Dalmatian Islands, sovereignty over the Dodecanese Islands, and a protectorate over Albania. These lands were to be confiscated from the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires.

  Were the Treaty of London to be fully honored, Harold Nicolson had noted, Italy would have been given dominion over “some 1,300,000 Yugoslavs, some 230,000 Germans, the whole Greek population of the Dodecanese, the Turks and Greeks of Adalia, all that was left of the Albanians, and vague areas of Africa.”3 Forced to listen to incessant Italian demands for full payment for having joined the Allies, plus Rome’s added demand for the Croatian port of Fiume on the Adriatic, a disgusted Lord Balfour dismissed them as “swine.”4

  Italy had come home from Paris with South Tyrol, Trieste, and Istria, but believed she had been denied the Dalmatian coast and Fiume by Wilson and robbed of her share of the African spoils by Lloyd George.5 Italy felt cheated, for her sacrifices during the war had included more than four hundred thousand combat deaths.

  “Even before he took charge of Italy as the Fascist leader and through the period after 1922,” writes the Italian diplomat Luigi Villari, “Mussolini constantly urged a revision of these treaties [Versailles and St. Germain] and predicted a second European war if this was not done.”6 In 1922, however, it was domestic unrest that led to a Fascist march on Rome that brought to power this ex-socialist and war veteran who was determined to gain for Italy that place in the sun denied her at Paris.

  Mussolini had been in power for a decade before Hitler ever became Chancellor. During that decade, Il Duce’s attitude toward the Nazi leader may be summed up in a single word: contempt. But Hitler’s admiration for Il Duce bordered on adulation. As leader of the National Socialist Party in 1927, Hitler had, through the Berlin head of the Italian Chamber of Commerce, requested a signed photograph of Il Duce. Across the memorandum Mussolini scrawled in bold letters, “Request refused.”7

  When Hitler came to power, Mussolini, realizing the Nazis might attempt the violent overthrow of Versailles, imperiling the peace of Europe, proposed a Four-Power Pact. It was among the bolder and more visionary ideas of the era. Britain, France, Italy, and Germany would meet as equals to rectify the injustices of Versailles to avert another war. Il Duce “threw all his energy and enthusiasm into perfection of such a pact in 1933, but it was rejected by France, Britain and the pro-French Little Entente” of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Rumania.8

  Among the statesmen pouring cold water on Il Duce’s plan to create a new Concert of Europe was Winston Churchill: “In 1933, Churchill had in the House of Commons vigorously attacked Mussolini’s proposal for a four-power pact, the one comprehensive plan set forth in Europe which might have revised postwar treaties in a peaceful manner and held Hitler in check.”9

  SELLING OUT SOUTH TYROL

  THE FOREIGN POLICY HITLER would pursue began to take shape within a year of his having taken control of the Nazi Party. His first goal was a Rome-Berlin alliance. Believing that war might be necessary to overturn Versailles, Hitler wanted no repetition of 1914, when Italy, an ally, declared neutrality, then entered the war against Germany. In return for an alliance, Hitler was prepared to surrender all German claims to South Tyrol. Writes biographer Ian Kershaw:

  Already in 1920, before he had heard of Fascism, [Hitler] was contemplating the value of an alliance with Italy. He was determined even then that the question of South Tyrol—the predominantly German-speaking part of the former Austrian province of Tyrol lying beyond the Brenner, ceded to Italy in 1919, and since then subjected to a programme of “Italianization”—would not stand in the way of such an alliance.10

  Though railing against the injustices of Versailles was a constant theme in his rise to power, Hitler displayed an opportunistic willingness to write off German lands and peoples to avoid wars he did not want and to gather allies for the new German goal: an empire in the east. “Almost alone of Germans, in 1926–27, Hitler did not complain of the Italianisation policies in Alto Adige [South Tyrol], pursued with Mussolini’s personal endorsement, and with that Fascist method well defined as the policy of ‘open conflicts, openly arrived at,’” writes R.J.B. Bosworth.11 Hitler would stubbornly admonish friends that any “reconquest of the South Tyrol…[is] impossible.”12

  When he took power in 1933, Hitler’s readiness to surrender South Tyrol was already being denounced by German and Austrian nationalists as the appeasement of Italy and the abandonment of a Germanic people.

  THE MURDER OF DOLLFUSS

  HITLER’S FIRST TRIP ABROAD, to meet Mussolini in Venice, June 14, 1934, was “a conspicuous failure.”13 Hitler made a dismal impression. He talked ceaselessly “and what he said was disquieting and repugnant…. Hitler made wounding observations on the superiority of the Nordic race and the negroid strain in the Mediterranean peoples.”14

  Hitler was shy and awkward on his first appearance in a foreign country and the disparity between the two leaders was emphasized by the difference in their appearance: the Duce in his Fascist uniform resplendent among his obedient and acclaiming crowds; and the Fuehrer ill at ease in a badly fitting suit, patent leather shoes, a shabby yellow mackintosh and an old gray felt hat…. To the eyes of the Venetians, he might have borrowed his wardrobe from Charlie Chaplin.15

  Foreign Minister von Neurath, who had advised Hitler on how to dress for his meeting with Mussolini, was never forgiven. Of his visitor, whom he considered a buffoon, Mussolini was contemptuous. He looked like a “plumber in a Mackintosh,” Mussolini mocked.16 “Instead of speaking to me about current problems, he recited…from Mein Kampf, that boring book which I have never been able to read.”17

  “What a clown this Hitler is,” Il Duce told an Italian diplomat.18

  One problem the two had discussed was Austria.

  Determined to bring Austria into Germany’s orbit, Hitler knew the time was not ripe. Any attempt at Anschluss would be forcibly resisted by Italy, which saw Austria as its buffer state. Hitler was warned by Mussolini not to intervene, and he assured his host he would respect Austrian sovereignty but went no further, for his SS was secretly backing Austrian Nazis in a terror campaign against Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss.

  Mussolini sensed what was about to happen. As early as 1933, he had confided to his son Vittorio, “The saucepan’s boiling under poor Dollfuss and it’s Hitler who’s stoking the fire.”19

  Dollfuss was a fierce nationalist determined to retain the independence of his landlocked nation that had been mutilated by the Treaty of St. Germain. His government has been described as a “repressive single-party dictatorship bearing some distinctly fascist traits.”20 Political parties had been banned. And Dollfuss had not recoiled from using tanks and artillery on rebellious Austrian Social Democrats in a working-class housing project of “Red Vienna” in February 1934.

  “Leading Socialists, including their most influential ideologue, Otto Bauer, fled to safety through Vienna’s famous underground sewers,” writes Richard Evans, author of The Third Reich in Power. “Dollfuss now outlawed the Socialists altogether.”21 His real concern was the Nazi Party, banned since July 1933. Dollfuss intended to eliminate it. In Mussolini he had a friend and ally pledged to stand beside him should Germany intervene.

  Mussolini had become Dollfu
ss’s patron. On first meeting the Austrian chancellor in 1933, Il Duce had concluded, “Dollfuss in spite of his minuscule size, is a man of ingenuity, possessed of real will. Together, these qualities give a good impression.”22

  Two weeks after Hitler left Venice came the Night of the Long Knives, the “sanguinary liquidation of the S.A. Leader Roehm.”23

  Ernst Roehm was a decorated veteran of the Western Front who had marched beside Hitler in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch and been imprisoned for it. His storm troopers had fought the Nazis’ street battles with the Communists. When Hitler came to power, recruits had poured into the SA. Roehm’s prestige and power soared. By mid-1934, with his vast army of bully boys, Ernst Roehm was a rival to Hitler and preaching a “second revolution.” Hitler was under pressure from President Hindenburg, the German generals, industrialists, and conservatives such as ex-chancellor von Papen, who helped bring him to power, to suppress Roehm’s SA. Initially reluctant, Hitler, in the summer of 1934, moved with ruthless efficiency in a lightning purge. Europe was stunned.

  Having caught his old comrade in a homosexual tryst, Hitler had him executed, along with scores of brownshirt leaders. The SS used the occasion to settle accounts with ex-chancellor Kurt von Schleicher. He was murdered with his wife at their home. The Night of the Long Knives was the first act of state terror of the Third Reich and revealed the character of Hitler and his regime. To the Nazis, murder was a legitimate weapon to deal with political enemies. Between 150 and 200 people died. Mussolini was shaken. Reading of how Hitler relished the role of executioner of former comrades, Mussolini

  burst into a room in which his sister Edvige was sitting and waved a bundle of newspapers: “He is a cruel and ferocious character and calls to mind legendary characters of the past: Attila. Those men he killed were his closest collaborators, who hoisted him into power. It is as if I came to kill with my own hands, Balbo, Grandi, Bottai…”24

  Il Duce now knew that the Hitler he had considered a buffoon in Venice was a decisive, ruthless, menacing, and formidable figure, unlike any European statesman with whom he had dealt in a decade in power.

  Six weeks after Hitler’s visit to Venice, 150 Austrian Nazis stormed the chancery in Vienna. Most of the Cabinet, warned in advance, had fled. But the gritty little Dollfuss refused to run. From six inches away, he was shot in the throat. As the celebrating Nazis went on national radio to announce his resignation, Dollfuss, ignored by his killers, bled to death, the only European leader to die a martyr’s death resisting Nazism.

  Berlin hailed the coup. Whether Hitler knew it was coming remains in dispute. But when word reached him at the Bayreuth Festival in Munich that Dollfuss had died at 6 P.M., that the putsch had been quelled, and that the Nazi assassins were under arrest, Hitler was alarmed. Given the Austrian Nazi hand in the coup, Mussolini might well conclude that Hitler had lied to him.

  Late that night, at the home of Wagner’s widow, Cosima, who had died in 1930, Hitler appeared nervous. He phoned Berlin, only to be told the German ambassador in Vienna was negotiating for safe passage for the Nazi assassins out of Austria. Hitler shouted that the ambassador had no such instructions. Nearly incoherent with rage, he countermanded Berlin’s orders, fired his ambassador in Vienna, and demanded that Franz von Papen, under house arrest since he had narrowly escaped Nazi death squads in the Roehm purge, be flown to Munich. Papen had befriended Dollfuss and warned Hitler about the Austrian Nazis.25

  Papen found Hitler in a “state of hysterical agitation, denouncing feverishly the rashness and stupidity of the Austrian Nazi Party for having involved him in such an appalling situation.”26

  “We are faced with a new Sarajevo!” Hitler shouted.27

  Hitler was right to be nervous. Mussolini, who had been hosting Dollfuss’s family and had to break the news of his assassination to his wife, was enraged and ordered four divisions to the Brenner. Il Duce sent word to Vienna: If Germany invades, Italy will go to war. In a show of support, Mussolini departed for Austria, where he vented his disgust at Hitler and the Nazis to vice chancellor Prince Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg: “It would mean the end of European civilization if this country of murderers and pederasts were to overrun Europe.”28

  Starhemberg recalls Mussolini, eyes rolling, delivering a tirade against the Nazis: “Hitler is the murderer of Dollfuss…a horrible sexual degenerate, a dangerous fool.”29 Nazism was a “revolution of the old Germanic tribes of the primeval forest against the Latin civilization of Rome.”30 To Il Duce, Italian Fascism was a world apart from Nazism:

  Both are authoritarian systems, both are collectivist, socialistic. Both systems oppose liberalism. But Fascism is a regime that is rooted in the great cultural tradition of the Italian people; Fascism recognizes the right of the individual, it recognizes religion and family. National Socialism…is savage barbarism; the chieftain is lord over life and death of his people. Murder and killing, loot and pillage and blackmail are all it can produce.31

  Mussolini hoped Britain and France would recognize the danger and form a united front:

  Hitler will arm the Germans and make war—perhaps even in two or three years. I cannot stand up to him alone…. I cannot always be the one to march to the Brenner. Others must show some interest in Austria and the Danube basin…. We must do something, we must do something quickly.32

  While Italy had mobilized troops, Britain and France had done nothing. Mussolini was confirmed in his convictions about the decadence of the democracies and “resolved petulantly that he would not again attempt to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for the West.”33

  For Hitler, the failed Austrian coup was a debacle and a humiliation. Writes historian Ernest May, “In foreign newspapers and magazines…Hitler saw himself ridiculed. Punch pictured Germany as a dachshund cowering before a mastiff labeled, ‘Italy.’”34

  Hitler had to repudiate his fellow Nazis on the other side of the Inn River. Signing a formal agreement that promised no interference in Austria’s internal affairs, he dissolved the Austrian Legion, a group that had been training in Bavaria. He even issued an order forbidding Nazis in Germany to have any contact with Nazis in Austria.35

  Looking back in 1942, Hitler—perhaps exaggerating to impress his listeners—recalled the Austrian Nazis’ Vienna coup as far more fraught with peril than any had assumed at the time:

  I shall never forget that at the time of the Austrian National Socialist coup d’etat in 1934…[T]he unarmed Germany of the time would have emerged from a struggle against the combined forces of France, Italy and Great Britain in a state of ruin and desolation comparable only to the situation at the end of the Thirty Years’ War.36

  The crisis passed and, in January of 1935, Hitler’s Reich received an enormous boost in morale and legitimacy. Writes British historian A.J.P. Taylor,

  [T]he Saar—detached from Germany in 1919—held a plebiscite on its future destiny. The inhabitants were mostly industrial workers—Social Democrats or Roman Catholics. They knew what awaited them in Germany: dictatorship, destruction of trade unions, persecution of the Christian churches. Yet, in an unquestionably free election, 90% voted for return to Germany. Here was proof that the appeal of German nationalism would be irresistible—in Austria, in Czechoslovakia, in Poland.37

  Speaking in Saarbrücken on March 1 of his joy at the Saarlanders’ vote to return to the Reich, Hitler, the Versailles amputations in mind, proclaimed, “In the end, blood is stronger than any document of mere paper. What ink has written will one day be blotted out by blood.”38

  With the Saar’s return, Hitler prepared his next move. On March 9, 1935, Hermann Göring informed a correspondent of the London Daily Mail that the Luftwaffe would become an official branch of the armed forces. The next Saturday, the Nazis announced that Germany was reimposing conscription and calling up 300,000 men to create an army of 36 divisions. This was the first formal breach of Versailles. Hitler reassured the French ambassador he had no designs on the West as he delivered a blazing tirade against S
talin and Bolshevism. The French envoy was soothed. Paris appealed feebly to the League of Nations against this brazen violation of the 1919 peace treaty that had been crafted with France’s security foremost in mind.

  Britain and France now began to believe Mussolini might be right. With German rearmament under way, and the murder of Dollfuss and the failed Austrian coup in mind, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and French prime minister Pierre Flandin and Foreign Minister Pierre Laval agreed to meet with Mussolini in Stresa on Lake Maggiore from April 11 to 14.

  Passed over by many historians, this was a crucial meeting in the interwar period. For in 1935, as Oxford’s R. B. McCallum has written, “Italy, with her military force and strong and virile Government, held the balance of power in Europe.”39 At the end of the Stresa conference a communiqué was issued denouncing German rearmament as a violation of Versailles and affirming the three nations’ commitment to the principles of Locarno.

  THE LOCARNO PACT

  THE LOCARNO TREATY OF MUTUAL Guarantee—negotiated in that Swiss town and signed in London in 1925—was the brainchild of German foreign minister Gustav Stresemann. He had suggested to the British that, rather than siding with France against a friendly and democratic Germany by guaranteeing France’s border, Britain should guarantee the borders of both nations. As described by historian Correlli Barnett, the Locarno pact was a group of treaties:

  Germany, Belgium and France bound themselves to recognize as inviolable not only their existing mutual frontiers, but also the demilitarisation of the Rhineland. Thus Germany now voluntarily accepted in respect of the Rhineland and her western frontiers what had been imposed on her at Versailles. The three countries further pledged themselves that in no case would they attack, invade or resort to war against one another. All these obligations were guaranteed by Italy and England; in other words, the guarantors were immediately to intervene against a power which broke the treaty by violating the frontier of another…. [T]hey were similarly to intervene if Germany violated the demilitarised zone.40