Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  CHAPTER 6

  1936: The Rhineland

  A NATION OF seventy millions of people suffers, but it does not die.1

  —MATTHIAS ERZBERGER TO MARSHAL FOCH

  November 11, 1918

  I assure the House that it is the appeasement of Europe as a whole that we have constantly before us.2

  —ANTHONY EDEN, 1936

  WITH THE BREAKUP OF the Stresa Front and the falling-out of the Allies over Abyssinia, Hitler saw his opening to secure his French frontier—before he renewed the Drang nach Osten, the ancient German drive to the east.

  Under Versailles, Germany west of the Rhine had been demilitarized, as had the bridgeheads and an area fifty kilometers east of the river. In the Rhineland, German troops, armaments, or fortifications were forbidden. This was to give France time and space to meet any attack inside Germany rather than in Alsace. A demilitarized Rhineland meant that, at the outbreak of war, the French army could march in and occupy the Ruhr, the industrial heartland of Germany. The Rhineland was to France what the Channel was to England.

  Under Versailles, France had the right to occupy the Rhineland until 1935. But at British insistence, and as a gesture of goodwill to the German democrats facing nationalist pressure, French troops had been pulled out in 1930, five years ahead of schedule. One British historian calls this withdrawal a “strategic catastrophe.”3

  The French military frontier had been brought back from the Rhine and its bridgeheads to the French national frontier. There was no longer a military presence physically to prevent Germany from sending in troops to re-occupy and re-militarise what had now become a strategic No-Man’s-Land. The integrity of the de-militarised zone, upon which the security of France and the Low Countries so depended, rested now either on Germany’s good faith, or, in default of that hitherto fragile safeguard, upon the readiness and willingness of the French to march forward and turn invading German forces out again—a major military operation, indeed an act of war.4

  France had abandoned vital strategic terrain. Should the Germans, in belligerency or ingratitude, remilitarize the Rhineland, France would have to go to war to take back what had been given to her at Versailles. Had France consulted her security interests rather than her British allies, the French army would have stood on the Rhine the day Hitler took power. But, in 1936, the Rhineland had been free of French troops for half a decade.

  Hitler knew that Western statesmen and peoples nurtured a sense of guilt over Versailles and he intuitively sensed how to play upon that guilt. He would first identify an injustice of Versailles, or a new threat to a disarmed Germany. Then, playing the aggrieved party, he would announce what seemed a proportionate response, protesting all the while that he was acting only in self-defense or to assert Germany’s right to equality of treatment. To soothe Allied fears, Hitler tied his response to an olive branch.

  The issue that triggered Hitler’s boldest assault on the terms of Versailles was a vote in the French Chamber of Deputies to approve an anti-German pact between France and Bolshevik Russia, Germany’s mortal enemy. Rising in Kroll Opera House that fateful Saturday, March 7, 1936, Hitler declared that if France and Stalin’s Russia were ganging up on Germany, he had a sworn duty to act in defense of the Fatherland. Ian Kershaw describes Hitler’s speech that was broadcast to the nation:

  After a lengthy preamble denouncing Versailles, restating Germany’s demands for equality and security, and declaring his peaceful aims, a screaming onslaught on Bolshevism brought wild applause. This took Hitler into his argument that the Soviet-French pact had invalidated Locarno.5

  Under the Locarno pact, Germany, France, and Belgium accepted as inviolate the borders laid down at Versailles. Germany had accepted the loss of Alsace and Lorraine and agreed to the permanent demilitarization of the Rhineland. And, under Locarno, Britain and Italy had agreed to defend those borders against “flagrant aggression.”6

  Unlike Versailles, which Germany had signed only under a threat of having Marshal Foch march on Berlin, Locarno had neither been negotiated nor signed under duress. German democrats had proposed the idea to Great Britain. Austen Chamberlain had won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating Locarno, as had Gustav Stresemann, the German foreign minister. In Allied eyes, Locarno—not Versailles, which Hitler denounced with endless invective—was the real guarantee of peace. For Hitler had himself accepted Locarno.

  Thus, when Hitler rose to speak at Kroll Opera House on that fateful day, he began by charging that France had just violated the Locarno pact that Berlin had faithfully observed for ten years by entering an alliance with Soviet Communists—against Germany. And Hitler had a strong case. Any Franco-Soviet security pact implied a French commitment to attack Germany should Germany go to war with Stalin. And any French attack must come through the Rhineland. When the French Chamber of Deputies approved the Soviet mutual security pact on February 27, opponents of the treaty had made Hitler’s precise point: The French-Soviet treaty violates Locarno.

  Thus, after reciting arguments heard a week before in the Chamber of Deputies, Hitler paused—and continued:

  Germany regards itself, therefore, as…no longer bound by this dissolved [Locarno] pact…. In the interest of the primitive rights of a people to the security of its borders and safeguarding of its defence capability, the German Reich government has therefore from today restored the full and unrestricted sovereignty of the Reich in the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland.7

  The Nazis lifted the roof off Kroll Opera House. The six hundred Reichstag deputies, “all appointees of Hitler, little men with big bodies and bulging necks and cropped hair and pouched bellies and brown uniforms and heavy boots, little men of clay in his fine hands, leap to their feet like automatons, their right arms upstretched in the Nazi salute, and scream ‘Heil’s.’”8 “When the tumult eventually subsided,” writes Kershaw,

  Hitler advanced his “peace proposals” for Europe: a nonaggression pact with Belgium and France, demilitarization of both sides of the joint borders; an air pact; non-aggression treaties, similar to that with Poland, with other eastern neighbors; and Germany’s return to the League of Nations. Some thought Hitler was offering too much.9

  As France’s ambassador, André François-Poncet, wryly put it, “Hitler struck his adversary in the face, and as he did so declared: ‘I bring you proposals for peace!’”10

  Thus did Hitler—as a few lightly armed German battalions moved across the Rhine bridges, with bands playing, to the cheers of the crowds—assure the world of the defensive character of his operation. He had coupled the German army’s return to the Rhineland after seventeen years with an offer to negotiate a nonaggresion pact with France and to rejoin the League of Nations.

  Hitler had originally set 1937 as the date to send his army across the Rhine bridges, but had come to believe Germany must act sooner, as he feared Soviet and Allied rearmament would make a later move even more risky.11 While his generals had not opposed remilitarization—a strategic necessity if the Reich was to have freedom of action—some questioned his timing. At a February 27 lunch with Göring and Goebbels where the Rhineland had been the topic, Goebbels had summed up, “Still somewhat too early.”12 The German army was unprepared to resist the French army. Minister of War General Blomberg was said to be nearly paralyzed with fear over the French reaction. Walking out of Kroll Opera House after Hitler’s speech, William Shirer encountered the minister. “I ran into General Blomberg…. His face was white, his cheeks twitching.”13 Hitler would describe Blomberg as having behaved like a “hysterical maiden.”14

  Looking back, Western men profess astonishment the Allies did not strike and crush Hitler here and now. Why did they not eliminate the menace of Hitler’s Reich when the cost in lives would have been minuscule, compared with the tens of millions Hitler’s war would later consume?

  BEHIND THE ALLIED INACTION

  AMERICA IGNORED HITLER’S MOVE because she had turned her back on European power politics. Americans had concluded the
y had been lied to and swindled when they enlisted in the Allied cause in 1917. They had sent their sons across the ocean to “make the world safe for democracy,” only to see the British empire add a million square miles. They had been told it was a “war to end wars.” But out of it had come Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler, far more dangerous despots than Franz Josef or the Kaiser. They had lent billions to the Allied cause, only to watch the Allies walk away from their war debts. They had given America’s word to the world that the peace imposed on Germany would be a just peace based on the Fourteen Points and Wilson’s principle of self-determination, then watched the Allies dishonor America’s word by tearing Germany apart, forcing millions of Germans under foreign rule, and bankrupting Germany with reparations.

  For having been deceived and dragged into war, Americans blamed “the Merchants of Death”—the war profiteers—and the British propagandists who had lied about raped Belgian nuns and babies being tossed around on Prussian bayonets. By the 1930s, Americans, in the worst depression in their history, which had left a fourth of all family breadwinners out of work, believed they had been played for fools and gone to war “to pull England’s chestnuts out of the fire” and make the world safe for the British Empire.

  America was resolved never again to ignore the wise counsel of the Founding Fathers to stay out of foreign wars. With the outbreak of war in Abyssinia in 1935 and the League of Nations debating sanctions on Italy, a Democratic Congress passed and FDR signed the first of three neutrality acts to ensure that America stayed out of any new European war. At Chautauqua, on August 14, 1936, five months after Hitler’s Rhineland coup, FDR spoke for America as he thundered his anti-interventionist and antiwar sentiments:

  We shun political commitments which might entangle us in foreign wars; we avoid connection with the political activities of the League of Nations…. [W]e are not isolationists, except insofar as we seek to isolate ourselves from war…. I have seen war…. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed…. I hate war.15

  Americans saw no vital U.S. interest in whether German soldiers occupied German soil, on the other side of the Atlantic, 3,500 miles from the United States. They had a Depression to worry about. But why did Britain and France do nothing?

  The British had concluded that Keynes and the other savage critics of Versailles had been right in accusing the Allies of imposing a Carthaginian peace on Germany in violation of the terms of armistice. Britain was now led by decent men with dreadful memories and troubled consciences, who were afflicted with guilt over what had been done.

  No one wanted another European war. The horrors of the Western Front had been described in the poems and memoirs of those who had survived the trenches. The crippled and maimed were still visible in British cities, begging in the streets. The graves and war memorials were fresh. Few now believed it had been worth it. Three of the great houses of Europe had fallen, four empires had collapsed, nine million soldiers had perished. And what had it all been for? Ten years after the guns had fallen silent, a moving epitaph of the Great War had been penned by that most bellicose of leaders in the War Cabinet, the former First Lord of the Admiralty. Wrote Winston Churchill:

  Governments and individuals conformed to the rhythm of the tragedy, and swayed and staggered forward in helpless violence, slaughtering and squandering on ever-increasing scales, till injuries were wrought to the structure of human society which a century will not efface, and which may conceivably prove fatal to the present civilization…. Victory was to be bought so dear as to be almost indistinguishable from defeat. It was not to give even security to the victors…. The most complete victory ever gained in arms has failed to solve the European problem or to remove the dangers which produced the war.16

  When visiting French foreign minister Flandin asked what Britain would do if France marched against the German battalions in the Rhineland, Baldwin told him: “[I]f there is even one chance in a hundred that war would follow from your police action I have not the right to commit England. England is simply not in a state to go to war.”17 A.J.P. Taylor describes how Baldwin explained Britain’s impotence:

  Tears stood in [Baldwin’s] eyes as he confessed that the British had no forces with which to support France. In any case, he added, British public opinion would not allow it. This was true: there was almost unanimous approval in Great Britain that the Germans had liberated their own territory. What Baldwin did not add was that he agreed with this public opinion. The German reoccupation of the Rhineland was, from the British point of view, an improvement and a success for British policy.18

  Baldwin believed and hoped Hitler’s ambitions might be directed to the east. In July of 1936, he met with a deputation of senior Conservatives that included Churchill.

  Baldwin told them that he was not convinced that Hitler did not want to “move east,” and if he did, “I should not break my heart.” If there was any “fighting in Europe to be done,” Baldwin would “like to see the Bolshies and the Nazis doing it.”19

  A measure of the moral unreadiness of Britain for war may be seen in the mind-set of George V in the Abyssinian crisis. To Foreign Secretary Sam Hoare the king had spoken in anguish, “I am an old man. I have been through one world war. How can I go through another? If I am to go on you must keep us out of this one.”20 When warships were dispatched to the Mediterranean to prepare for action against the Italian navy, George V had been even more emphatic as he poured out his heart to Lloyd George: “I will not have another war. I will not. The last one was none of my doing and if there is another one and we are threatened with being brought into it, I will go to Trafalgar Square and wave a red flag myself rather than allow this country to be brought in.”21 Behind the king’s anguish, writes Andrew Roberts, was a sense that it was “considered axiomatic that another war would spell doom for the British Empire.”22

  The royal family, which had watched the stock of monarchies diminishing after European wars, had acquired highly developed antennae for survival. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 had led to the fall of the French imperial throne. By the end of the Great War the imperial crowns of Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary lay in the dust.

  The Second World War was to destroy the thrones of Italy, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia, so it was understandable that the British royal familiy should have embraced appeasement.23

  Also, many in Britain now believed that France and her huge army were a greater threat to the balance of power than Germany. Some even welcomed Hitler’s buildup—to check France. Others admired how Hitler had revived a crushed nation. And the chickens of Abyssinia had come home to roost.

  [T]he Germans had chosen their moment well. English chivalry over Abyssinia had shattered the Stresa front…. Relations between England and her Locarno guarantor, Italy, were at present as hostile as it was possible for them to be, short of outright war. England was now in the absurd situation of having to consult Italy about the German aggression at a time when she was acting as the ringleader at Geneva in attempts to thwart Italy’s ambition in Abyssinia.24

  Lloyd George not only opposed any British-French military action in the Rhineland, he called on his colleagues to try to see the world from Germany’s point of view. Even before this latest pact between Paris and Moscow, Germany was encircled by French alliances that included Belgium, Poland, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. Now Germany faced a Stresa Front of Italy, France, and Britain and a new Franco-Soviet alliance that imperiled the most important industrial area of Germany, the undefended Ruhr. Lloyd George implored Parliament to see Germany’s dilemma and forcefully argued Hitler’s case in the House of Commons:

  France had built the most gigantic fortifications ever seen in any land, where, almost a hundred feet underground you can keep an army of over 100,000 and where you have guns that can fire straight into Germany. Yet, the Germans are supposed to remain without even a garrison, wit
hout even a trench…. If Herr Hitler had allowed that to go on without protecting his country, he would have been a traitor to the Fatherland.25

  After commending Hitler for having reoccupied the Rhineland to protect his country, Lloyd George received an invitation—to Berchtesgaden. Out of that meeting, the ex–prime minister emerged “spellbound by Hitler’s astonishing personality and manner.”26 “He is indeed a great man” were Lloyd George’s first words, as he compared Mein Kampf to the Magna Carta and declared Hitler “The Resurrection and the Way” for Germany.27

  In an interview with the News-Chronicle on his return to England, Lloyd George assured his countrymen, “Germany has no desire to attack any country in Europe…Hitler is arming for defence and not for attack.”28 Asked what he thought of Germany having become a dictatorship, the old prime minister responded, “Hitler has done great things for his country. He is unquestionably a great leader…a dynamic personality.”29

  Nor was Lloyd George alone among British statesmen in being taken with Hitler. Eden had met with Hitler in 1934 and written his wife, “Dare I confess?…I rather liked him.”30 John Simon, Eden’s predecessor as foreign secretary, described Hitler to King George as “an Austrian Joan of Arc with a moustache.”31

  In 1937, three years after the Night of the Long Knives murders of Roehm and his SA henchmen, two years after the Nuremberg Laws had been imposed on the Jews, one year after Hitler had marched into the Rhineland, Churchill published Great Contemporaries. He included in it his 1935 essay “Hitler and His Choice.” In this profile, Churchill expresses his “admiration for the courage, the perseverance, and the vital force which enabled [Hitler] to challenge, defy, conciliate, or overcome, all the authorities or resistances which barred his path.”32