“Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face,” wrote Churchill, “have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism.”33 Hitler and his Nazis had surely shown “their patriotic ardor and love of country.”34 Churchill went on to conclude:
We cannot tell whether Hitler will be the man who will once again let loose upon the world another war in which civilization will irretrievably succumb, or whether he will go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the great Germanic nation…. [H]istory is replete with examples of men who have risen to power by employing stern, grim, and even frightful methods but who, nevertheless, when their life is revealed as a whole, have been regarded as great figures whose lives have enriched the story of mankind. So may it be with Hitler.35
Churchill concluded his essay on a hopeful note: “We may yet live to see Hitler a gentler figure in a happier age.”36
In September of 1937, Churchill wrote of Hitler “in a clearly placatory tone that…sits extremely ill with his image as the mortal foe of Nazism”:
One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.37
Thus did even the Great Man believe about Hitler, a year after he reentered the Rhineland, and years after Dachau was established, Versailles overthrown, Roehm and the SA leaders murdered on Hitler’s orders and with his personal complicity, and the anti-Semitic laws enacted. About the reoccupation of the Rhineland, biographer Roy Jenkins finds Churchill strangely unconcerned:
On March 7 Hitler sent his troops into the demilitarized Rhineland, thereby defying Locarno as well as Versailles. Churchill’s initial reaction was muted. He telegraphed to Clementine that day, merely telling her that nothing was settled (by which he meant his inclusion in the government)…. [H]e did speak on the Tuesday [March 10]but in a curiously tentative and low-key way, never mentioning the Rhineland…. Despite his hindsight [in The Gathering Storm, 1948] Churchill was far from being rampageously strong on the Rhineland issue at the time…. [There was no] indication that Churchill thought irreversible disaster had struck either himself or the country.38
In his fortnightly letter of March 13, 1936, “Britain, Germany and Locarno,” republished in his 1939 collection of columns Step by Step, Churchill commended French restraint: “Instead of retaliating by armed force, as would have been done in a previous generation, France has taken the proper and prescribed course of appealing to the League of Nations.”39
The best solution to the Rhineland crisis, Churchill wrote, would be a beau geste by Adolf Hitler—to show his respect for the sanctity of treaties.
But there is one nation above all others that has the opportunity of rendering a noble service to the world. Herr Hitler and the great disconsolate Germany he leads have now the chance to place themselves in the very forefront of civilization. By a proud and voluntary submission, not to any single country or group of countries, but to the sanctity of Treaties and the authority of public law, by an immediate withdrawal from the Rhineland, they may open a new era for all mankind and create conditions in which German genius may gain its highest glory.40
Since the Allies are unwilling to use military power to enforce the terms of Locarno, Churchill is saying here, Hitler should do the noble thing voluntarily: withdraw all troops from the Rhineland, and thereby earn the goodwill and gratitude of the civilized world.
Nor did Britain’s elite seem concerned by Germany’s reoccupation of the Rhineland. Lord Lothian famously quipped, “The Germans, after all, are only going into their own back-garden.”41 Was it “flagrant aggression,” a violation of Locarno requiring Britain to act, for Germans to walk into their “own back-garden”? “It was as if the British had reoccupied Portsmouth,” echoed Bernard Shaw.42 Foreign Secretary Eden assured Britons, “There is, I am thankful to say, no reason to suppose that Germany’s present actions threaten hostilities.”43 Secretary for War Duff Cooper, who would resign as First Lord over Munich, told the German ambassador the British public “did not care ‘two hoots’ about the Germans reoccupying their own territory.”44
WHY WAS FRANCE PARALYZED?
IT IS FRANCE’S CONDUCT that is inexplicable. The Rhineland bordered on Alsace. Its importance to French security had been recognized at Versailles by Foch and Poincaré, who wanted to annex it, and by Clemenceau, who wanted to convert it into a buffer state. Only after Wilson and Lloyd George offered France a Treaty of Guarantee, an American-British guarantee to come to the aid of France were she attacked again by Germany, had Clemenceau agreed to settle for a fifteen-year occupation and its permanent demilitarization. If the Wehrmacht was in the Rhineland, it was not America or Britain face-to-face with a Germany of seventy million led by a vengeful Adolf Hitler. It was France.
“What was called for on that crucial Saturday of March 7, 1936,” writes William Shirer, “was a police action by the French to chase a few German troops who were parading into the Rhineland—this was clear even to a correspondent in Berlin that weekend.”45
Why, when Hitler had sent in only three lightly armed battalions, with orders to withdraw immediately if they met resistance, did France, with the most powerful army in the world, not march in, send the Germans scurrying back over the Rhine bridges, and restation French troops on the river? Decisive action, warranted by Versailles and Locarno, to which Britain was signatory and which she would have had to back up, might have prevented World War II. The Poles and Czechs had indicated that, if France acted, they would be with her. Even Austria supported her. Why did France not act?
First, the French recalled 1923, when they had marched into the Ruhr to force Germany to pay the war reparations imposed at Versailles, on which the Germans were defaulting. The French move so disgusted the United States that the Americans pulled out their occupation troops and brought them home. Most of the world had denounced France. The Germans had gone on strike. Paris had gotten a black eye in world opinion.
Second, by January 1930, when she acceded to a British request to vacate the Rhineland by midyear, in a concession to German democracy, France had adopted a Maginot Line strategy, named for Minister of War André Maginot, and begun to build vast defensive fortifications on her eastern border, a Great Wall in front of Alsace-Lorraine. Militarily, the Rhineland was now no-man’s-land. By making the Maginot Line her defense line, France had ceded the Rhineland to Germany. By adopting the Maginot Line strategy and mentality, wholly defensive in character, France had signaled to all of Europe, including her allies to the east, in the clearest way possible, that she would fight only if invaded and only a defensive war. The message of the Maginot Line was that any European nation east of the Rhine was on its own.
As the French government debated military action, it called in the army commander in chief. General Maunce Gamelin asked the ministers if they were aware Hitler had a million men under arms and 300,000 already in the Rhineland and that any move to retake the territory would require general mobilization. This was an absurd exaggeration of Nazi strength. Gamelin added that the French army was understrength because the politicians had failed to provide the needed resources. As this was only six weeks before a general election, the Cabinet reacted with shock and horror. Gamelin did muster thirteen divisions near the German border, but they did not cross it.
“The forty-eight hours after the march into the Rhineland were the most nerve-racking in my life,” Hitler later said. “If the French had then marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs.”46 He need not have been alarmed, for Hitler was dealing with defeatist leaders of a morally defeated nation. At Nuremberg, General Jodl would testify, “Considering the situation we were in, the French covering army could have blown us to pieces.”47 Added Shirer,
It could have—and had
it, that almost certainly would have been the end of Hitler, after which history might have taken quite a different and brighter turn than it did, for the dictator could never have survived such a fiasco. Hitler himself admitted as much. “A retreat on our part,” he conceded later, “would have spelled collapse.”48
Churchill, in his war memoirs, adopts the same view that, had the French army entered the Rhineland and run the German battalions out, the German generals might have rebelled and overthrown Hitler: “[T]here is no doubt that Hitler would have been compelled by his own General Staff to withdraw, and a check would have been given to his pretensions which might well have proved fatal to his rule.”49
Historian Ernest May ridicules Churchill’s contention. “Not a scrap of evidence supports such a story” of German generals ready in 1936 to oust Hitler for overreaching in the Rhineland, May writes: “Neither Fritsch nor Beck evidenced serious misgivings.”50 Hitler was far more popular in 1936 than he had been in 1934, and there had been no move against him after the Vienna debacle. There is no logical reason “to suppose that a setback in the Rhineland in 1936 would have had any worse effect on Hitler’s standing with the German public than the setback in Austria in 1934.”51
How great a strategic setback was the Rhineland debacle?
For France the failure to oppose the German reoccupation of the demilitarized zone was a disaster, and one from which all the later ones of even greater magnitude followed. The two Western democracies had missed their last chance to halt, without the risk of a serious war, Nazi Germany….
The whole structure of European peace and security set up in 1919 collapsed. The French alliances with the countries to the east of Germany were rendered useless. As soon as Hitler had fortified the Rhineland, the French army, even if it found more resolute generals, would no longer be able to achieve a quick penetration of Germany to aid the Eastern allies if they were attacked.52
Seeing France’s paralysis, Belgium’s King Leopold III, who had succeeded his father, the heroic Albert, in 1934, declared neutrality and scrapped the Franco-Belgian alliance of 1920—“with the optimism of the imprudent little pigs, ‘This policy should aim resolutely at keeping us apart from the quarrels of our neighbors.’”53
As the Maginot Line ended at Belgium, France’s northern border was now as exposed as it had been in 1914, when French generals had to watch and wait as von Kluck’s armies drove through Belgium. “In one stroke,” writes British military historian Alistair Horne, “the whole of her Maginot Line strategy lay in fragments.”54
France would blame Britain for not backing her up when French diplomats went to London to ask for support for military action. But as Churchill wrote, this is an “explanation but no excuse…since the issue was vital to France.”55 Under Versailles and Locarno, France had the right to expel the German battalions that were in the Rhineland in violation of both treaties. And the British were obligated to assist her militarily. What France should have done was act and force Britain’s hand. Britain would have had to back up the French army. But the French army did not move, so Britain was off the hook.
Once he had the Rhineland, Hitler began to construct his West Wall, the Siegfried Line. Its significance was recognized by Churchill. “[I]t will be a barrier across Germany’s front door, which will leave her free to sally out eastward and southward by the back door.”56 On April 6, 1936, Churchill observed that the rising Rhineland fortifications
will enable the German troops to be economised on that line, and…enable the main force to swing round through Belgium and Holland. Then look East. There the consequences of the Rhineland fortifications may be more immediate…. Poland and Czechoslovakia, with which must be associated Yugoslavia, Roumania, Austria and some other countries, are all affected very decisively the moment that this great work of construction has been completed.57
Week by week, the West Wall rose, Germany grew stronger, and the locus of action shifted farther and farther away, and French willingness to die for distant lands eroded. The significance of the lost moment is captured by Shirer:
France’s failure to repel the Wehrmacht battalions and Britain’s failure to back her up in what would have been nothing more than a police action was a disaster for the West from which sprang all the later ones of even greater magnitude. In March 1936 the two Western democracies were given their last chance to halt, without the risk of a serious war, the rise of a militarized, aggressive, totalitarian Germany, and in fact—as we have seen Hitler later admitting—bring the Nazi dictator and his regime tumbling down. They let the chance slip by.
For France it was the beginning of the end.58
All of France’s Eastern allies—Russia, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Poland—grasped the significance of Hitler’s coup. If France would not fight in the Rhineland to guarantee her own security, would she order hundreds of thousands of French soldiers to their deaths against a German West Wall—to save the peoples of Central Europe? The German foreign minister, Konstantin von Neurath, explained the new strategic reality to William Bullitt, the U.S. ambassador to France who had called on him in Berlin: “As soon as our [West Wall] fortifications are constructed and the countries of Central Europe realize that France cannot enter German territory at will, all those countries will begin to feel very differently about their foreign policies and a new constellation will develop.”59
The new reality would soon assert itself and all Europe would realize its implications. With Belgium now neutral, France must now extend the Maginot Line to the Channel. With Hitler’s West Wall rising, France could no longer march into the Rhineland and seize the Ruhr on behalf of her allies in Central Europe. With Mussolini now aligned with Hitler, no power could intervene directly to halt Hitler’s inevitable next move—turning Austria into a vassal state. After Austria must come the turn of Czechoslovakia and Poland, both of which held large German populations as anxious to join the Reich as the Saarlanders had been. “The evacuation of the Rhineland led therefore to a calamitous weakening of France’s defensive position,” writes Correlli Barnett. “Perhaps more serious, it removed the last positive French hold over Germany.”60
On March 29, 1936, Hitler held a plebiscite on his decision to send the Wehrmacht in to restore German sovereignty to the Rhineland. Ninety-nine percent of the German people voted to approve his tearing up of the Versailles Treaty and repudiation of the Locarno pact.61
March 1936 was the crucial moment of the postwar era. Versailles was dead. Locarno was dead. Stresa was dead. The League was on life support. The Allies had lost the last chance to stop Hitler without war. “The reoccupation of the Rhineland marked the watershed between 1919 and 1939,” writes Alistair Horne. “No other single event in this period was more loaded with dire significance. From March 1936, the road to France’s doom ran downhill all the way.”62
And the road to Vienna lay open to Hitler.
As an awakened Churchill observed late in that month of March in which Hitler had sent his battalions across the Rhine: “An enormous triumph has been gained by the Nazi regime.”63 Added Prime Minister Baldwin in April, “With two lunatics like Mussolini and Hitler, you can never be sure of anything. But I am determined to keep the country out of war.”64
CHAPTER 7
1938: Anschluss
GERMAN-AUSTRIA MUST RETURN to the great German mother-country…. Common blood belongs in a common Reich.1
—ADOLF HITLER, 1925
Mein Kampf
The hard fact is that nothing could have arrested what actually happened [in Austria]—unless this country and other countries had been prepared to use force.2
—NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN, 1938
AT THE PARIS CONFERENCE, an amputated, landlocked Austria of 6.5 million had asked Allied permission to enter into a free-trade zone with a starving Germany. Permission denied. In April and May of 1921, plebiscites on a union with Germany were held in the North Tyrol and at Salzburg: “The votes in the former were over 140,000 for the Anschluss and only
1,794 against. In Salzburg, more than 120,000 voted for union, and only 800 against. This was twelve years before Hitler became Reichsführer.”3
Permission again denied. For the statesmen at Paris did not wish to unify Germans, but to divide them, and to undo the post-1870 alliance of Bismarck’s Germany and the Habsburgs. Under the treaties of Versailles and St. Germain, even a customs union between Austria and Germany was forbidden—without the approval of the League of Nations. This gave Britain, France, and Italy veto power over trade between the two defeated Germanic nations.
In 1931, hard hit by depression, Germany again asked for permission to form an Austro-German customs union. The idea was the brainchild of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning. But President Eduard Beneš of Czechoslovakia and Britain, France, and Italy vetoed it. Historian Richard Lamb, a veteran of the British Eighth Army, views the Allied veto of that customs union as a grave blunder that was to have “dire consequences for both the German and Austrian economies” and, he argues, “the resulting economic distress contributed to the rapid rise of the Nazis to power in Germany.”4 Alan Bullock concurs. The Czech-Italian-French veto of the Austro-German customs union
not only helped to precipitate the failure of the Austrian Kreditanstalt and the German financial crisis of the summer but forced the German Foreign Office to announce on September 3 that the project was being abandoned. The result was to inflict a sharp humiliation on the Brüning government and to inflame national resentment in Germany.5
Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War Page 18