Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  Robert Vansittart of the British Foreign Office had warned British leaders that “Brüning’s government is the best we can hope for; its disappearance would be followed by a Nazi avalanche.”6 Vansittart’s warning was ignored.

  Brüning resigned. He was succeeded as chancellor by Franz von Papen, who implored the Allies, given Germany’s economic crisis in the Great Depression, to wipe the slate clean of war reparations. But the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, refused, and demanded another four billion marks. In negotiations, Chamberlain magnanimously settled for three, to the cheers of Parliament. When the German negotiators returned home they were “met at the railway station by a shower of bad eggs and rotten apples.”7 Papen warned the Allies that if German democrats “were not granted a single diplomatic success, he would be the last democratic chancellor in Germany. He got none.”8

  In 1938, Hitler would succeed where the Allies had ensured that the German democrats would fail. “Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom,” Burke had admonished his countrymen.9

  THE HITLER-HALIFAX SUMMIT

  HISTORIANS TODAY SEE IN Hitler’s actions a series of preconceived and brilliant moves on the chessboard of Europe, reflecting the grand strategy of an evil genius unfolding step by step: rearmament of the Reich, reoccupation of the Rhineland, Anschluss, Munich, the Prague coup, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, blitzkrieg in Poland, the Rommel-Guderian thrust through the Ardennes, seizure of the Balkans, and Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia. This is mythology. While Hitler did indeed come to power with a “vision” of Versailles overturned and a German-dominated Europe, most of his actions were taken in spontaneous reaction to situations created by his adversaries. Hitler “owed all his successes to his tactical opportunism,” wrote Sir Nevile Henderson.10 Henderson was right. Surely this was true of the Anschluss.

  For two years after German troops reoccupied the Rhineland, Hitler made no move in Europe. “Until 1938, Hitler’s moves in foreign policy had been bold but not reckless,” writes biographer Ian Kershaw.11

  From the point of view of the Western powers, his methods were, to say the least, unconventional diplomacy—raw, brutal, unpalatable; but his aims were recognizably in accord with traditional German nationalist clamour. Down to and including the Anschluss, Hitler had proved a consummate nationalist politician.12

  Despite his braggadocio about German military superiority, Hitler knew his forces were inferior to the Royal Air Force and French army, if not to the Czechs and Poles. But he sensed that if he were patient, then, as the conservative German establishment had invited him to become chancellor, the Allies, full of guilt over Versailles and horrified at the prospect of another war, would come to offer him what he wanted. Hitler had read the Allies right.

  In 1937, Lord Halifax, who was close to Baldwin’s successor, the new prime minister Neville Chamberlain, was invited to Germany for a hunt with Hermann Göring, the legendary air ace who had succeeded Manfred von Richthofen as commander of the “Flying Circus” when the Red Baron had been shot down. When Halifax accepted, a second invitation came from Ambassador Ribbentrop—as Halifax told Eden—to “call upon the Leader at his Bavarian hideaway, ‘Berchtergaden, or wherever the place is.’”13 The Cabinet agreed that Halifax should go. But the Hitler-Halifax meeting almost ended before it began, in disaster.

  As the immensely tall Halifax was driven up to Berchtesgaden, he could only see, looking down out of the window of his car, the shiny patent-leather shoes and black-trousered pants legs of the man at his car door. Emerging from his limousine, Lord Halifax started to hand his hat and coat to the footman. Only after an agitated Neurath had hissed in his ear, “Der Fuehrer! Der Fuehrer!” did Halifax realize this was Adolf Hitler.14

  A diplomatic debacle had been narrowly averted.

  Throughout the meeting, Hitler remained in a foul mood. After lunch, Halifax brought up his experiences as viceroy of India, where he had urged a policy of conciliation. Hitler, who had just related how Lives of a Bengal Lancer was his favorite film, and compulsory viewing for the SS to show “how a superior race must behave,” rudely interrupted him.15

  “Shoot Gandhi!”16

  A startled Halifax fell silent, as Hitler went into a rant:

  “Shoot Gandhi! And if that does not suffice to reduce them to submission, shoot a dozen leading members of Congress; and if that does not suffice, shoot 200 and so on until order is established.”17

  “During this tirade,” writes biographer Andrew Roberts, citing a diplomat present, Halifax, a lay leader in the Anglican Church, “gazed at Hitler with a mixture of astonishment, repugnance and compassion. He indicated dissent, but it would have been a waste of time to argue.”18

  Early in the meeting, however, Halifax had delivered a crucial message on behalf of Chamberlain. Singling out Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Danzig, Halifax told Hitler that if “far-reaching disturbances” could be avoided, all of Germany’s grievances from Versailles, in Central Europe, could be resolved in Germany’s favor.19 Halifax had told Hitler what he had hoped to hear. Britain would not go to war to prevent an Anschluss with Austria, transfer the Sudetenland to the Reich, or return of Danzig. Indeed, Britain might be prepared to serve as honest broker in effecting the return of what rightfully belonged to Germany, if this were all done in a gentlemanly fashion.

  Hitler had just been handed a road map for the peaceful incorporation of the German peoples of Central Europe into the Reich, if only he would avoid those “far-reaching disturbances.” Writes A. J. P. Taylor,

  Halifax’s remarks…were an invitation to Hitler to promote German nationalist agitation in Danzig, Czechoslovakia, and Austria; an assurance also that this agitation would not be opposed from without. Nor did these promptings come from Halifax alone. In London Eden told Ribbentrop: “People in England recognized that a closer connection between Germany and Austria would have to come about sometime.”20

  Why was Halifax conveying such a message?

  Chamberlain had come to believe that, by tearing people and provinces away from Germany at the point of a gun, the Allies had made historic and terrible blunders in 1919. And the new prime minister was ready to rectify these injustices, if Hitler would agree that it would be done diplomatically. Chamberlain believed the peace of Europe depended upon Germany being restored to her rightful role as a coequal Great Power on the continent.

  The message Halifax conveyed at the Berghof underscores a crucial point in the history of this era: Hitler’s agenda was no surprise or shock to European statesmen. All of them knew that any German nationalist would demand the same rectifications and adjustments of the frontiers laid down at Versailles. The claims Hitler would make were known in advance and largely assented to by the elites of Europe as the preconditions of peace. Berlin’s drive to restore its ties to its former Vienna ally and effect the return of the Sudetenland, Danzig, and Memel to Germanic rule were not unanticipated demands in the chanceries of Europe. They knew what was coming.

  In his 1940 memoir Failure of a Mission, Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador in Berlin in 1937, wrote of the Halifax visit, “Hitler cannot but have been—and in fact, so I heard, was—impressed by the obvious sincerity, high principles, and straightforward honesty of a man like Lord Halifax.”21 Historian B. H. Liddell Hart saw it differently: “[T]he German documents reveal that Hitler derived special encouragement from Lord Halifax’s visit in November 1937.”22

  The day following his visit to the Berghof, Lord Halifax arrived at Karinhall, the vast estate and game preserve of Göring, where he found its proprietor decked out “in brown breeches and boots all in one, a green leather jerkin and a belt from which was hung a dagger in a red leather sheath, completed by a green hat topped by a large chamois tuft.”23 Put at ease by his host’s comical appearance, Halifax wrote down his impression of the hero of the Great War who now headed the Luftwaffe:

  I was immensely entertained at meeting the man himself. One remembered at the time that he ha
d been concerned with the “clean-up” in Berlin on June 30, 1934 [the Night of the Long Knives] and one wondered how many people he had been, for good cause or bad, responsible for having killed. But his personality, with that reserve, was frankly attractive, like a great schoolboy…a composite personality—film star, great landowner interested in his estate, Prime Minister, party manager, head gamekeeper at Chatsworth.24

  Lord Halifax, reported his friend Henry “Chips” Channon, had “liked all the Nazi leaders, even Goebbels, and he was much impressed, interested and amused by the visit. He thinks the regime absolutely fantastic.”25

  THE HITLER-SCHUSCHNIGG SUMMIT

  WITH ENGLAND’S BLESSING TO bring Austria into Germany’s sphere, if done peacefully, Hitler was left with but one problem: how to get the Austrians to agree. Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg would provide Hitler his opportunity.

  “A devout Catholic and intellectual, a decent man with little vanity or driving ambition,” a veteran of the Great War, Schuschnigg had arrested the Nazis involved in the plot against Dollfuss, hanged the two who fired the fatal shots, and had himself become chancellor in 1934.26 On July 11, 1936, he had entered into a “Gentlemen’s Agreement” with Berlin. Vienna was to “maintain a policy based on the principle that Austria acknowledges herself to be a German state,” and Berlin recognizes “the full sovereignty of the Federal State of Austria” and agrees not to interfere in her internal affairs.27 Respectable pro-Nazis were to be permitted in politics and government, but Nazis were to end political agitation and street action. A Committee of Seven was set up to carry out the terms of the Gentlemen’s Agreement. Hitler wanted no repetition of the abortive 1934 coup.

  “It was a bad bargain,” writes Manchester. “Secret clauses” of the Gentlemen’s Agreement “stipulated the muzzling of the Viennese press and amnesty for Nazi ‘political prisoners’ in Austrian jails—many of them storm troopers convicted of murdering Jews and critics of the Fuhrer.”28

  Austria’s Nazis ignored the agreement and continued to plot the overthrow of Schuschnigg. In January 1938, Austrian police raided the Committee of Seven headquarters and discovered plans there for a Nazi coup. Hitler had assured Mussolini there would be no Anschluss and, according to historian Taylor, he “knew nothing of these plans, which had been prepared despite his orders…. [T]he Austrian Nazis were acting without authority.”29

  An indignant Schuschnigg called in Ambassador Papen and showed him the evidence of Nazi violations of the Gentlemen’s Agreement. Papen, who had just been relieved of his Vienna post, had had his own clashes with the Austrian Nazis and was not amused to learn that they had planned to assassinate him as a provocation, while disguising themselves as members of Schuschnigg’s Fatherland Front. Papen suggested Schuschnigg take up the matter directly with Hitler.

  At this time, Hitler was in the grip of a political crisis and personal scandal. He had stood up on January 12 at the wedding of Minister of War Blomberg, after which it was discovered that Frau Blomberg had been a Berlin prostitute with a police record and had posed for pornographic photographs, taken by a Jew, with whom she had been living at the time. As Richard Evans writes, Hitler was mortified to the point of paralysis:

  Alarmed at the ridicule he would suffer if it became known that he had been witness to the marriage of an ex-prostitute, Hitler plunged into a deep depression, unable to sleep…. It was, wrote Goebbels in his diary, the worst crisis in the regime since the Roehm affair. “The Leader,” he reported, “is completely shattered.”30

  “Blomberg can’t be saved,” noted Goebbels. “Only the pistol remains for a man of honour…. The Fuhrer as marriage witness. It’s unthinkable…. The Fuhrer looks like a corpse.”31 Writes Kershaw, “Scurrilous rumours had it that Hitler took a bath seven times” the day after he was told “to rid himself of the taint of having kissed the hand of Frau Blomberg.”32 The following day, he was heard muttering, “If a German Field-Marshal marries a whore, anything in the world is possible.”33

  Blomberg resigned. The generals favored as his replacement army commander in chief Colonel-General von Fritsch. But Fritsch was regarded by the Nazis as even less reliable than Blomberg. So Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, gathered or fabricated evidence that Fritsch was a homosexual who had used a Berlin rent-boy known as “Bavarian Joe.” Hitler set up a meeting in his private library at the Reich Chancellery with Fritsch, the prostitute Otto Schmidt, and Göring. Schmidt and General Fritsch stuck by their contradictory stories. Unconvinced of his innocence, Hitler decided that Fritsch, too, must go.

  Meanwhile, Hjalmar Schacht, architect of Germany’s recovery from the Great Depression, had resigned, and Hitler was trying to bury the news by sweeping his Cabinet clean of all the old conservatives, including Neurath and Papen. As Hitler was casting about for a way to divert public attention from the lurid Blomberg and Fritsch scandals and the resignation of Schacht, Papen came to him with the recommendation that he invite Schuschnigg to Berchtesgaden. Hitler seized it. Set up a meeting at once, he told Papen.

  On February 12, Schuschnigg arrived at Berchtesgaden, intending to play the victim who had faithfully adhered to the Gentlemen’s Agreement, only to see it blatantly violated by treacherous Austrian Nazis. Hitler did not wait to hear him out. He exploded, addressing Austria’s chancellor as “Herr Schuschnigg” and berating him for having been first to violate their 1936 agreement. “The whole history of Austria,” Hitler ranted, “is just one uninterrupted act of high treason. That was so in the past and remains so today.”34 Hitler then proceeded to issue his own demands.

  Germany would renew its full support of Austria’s sovereignty if all imprisoned Austrian National Socialists, including the assassins of Dollfuss, were set free within three days and all dismissed National Socialist officials and officers were reinstated in their former positions. In addition, Artur Seyss-Inquart, the leader of the moderate Pan-German faction, was to be appointed Minister of Interior with full, unlimited control of the nation’s police forces; a “moderate” Austrian Nazi was to be Minister of Defense.35

  Vienna was also to coordinate its economic and foreign policies with Berlin. Schuschnigg replied that he lacked the authority to make such commitments, which would mean an end to Austrian sovereignty. He wished to return to Vienna and consult with President Miklas and his Cabinet. Hitler continued to rant, called his generals in and out of the room to intimidate the Austrian chancellor, then sent Schuschnigg away for two hours to reflect on the consequences should he refuse the Fuehrer’s demands.

  Though bullied brutally, Schuschnigg returned to Vienna with a deal. Seyss-Inquart got the security post, but Germany condemned the Austrian Nazis and Hitler made good on his promise to remove the worst of the lot. The Nazi underground leader in Austria, Captain Josef Leopold, was called before Hitler and denounced as “insane.”36 Other Austrian Nazis were expelled and also berated by Hitler, who conceded in his notebook, “This Schuschnigg was a harder bone than I first thought.”37

  By mid-February the Austrian crisis was over. The German army units demonstrating on the border had stood down and Hitler had informed the Reichstag, “Friendly co-operation between the two countries has been assured…. I would like to thank the Austrian Chancellor in my own name, and in that of the German people, for his understanding and kindness.”38

  “When a snake wants to eat his victims,” snorted Churchill, “he first covers them with saliva.”39

  SCHUSCHNIGG RELIGHTS THE FUSE

  HITLER HAD NOT ABANDONED his plan to convert Austria into a satellite, but believed this should and would come about through an “evolutionary solution.”40 Austria would drop like ripe fruit, for, with Italy now an Axis power, she was isolated, had nowhere else to go, and the Allies had neither the will nor the power to prevent her eventual merger with the Reich. As for Austria’s Nazis, Hitler was incensed that they had again disrupted and imperiled his “evolutionary solution.”

  But while the crisis appeared over, it was not. For Schus
chnigg, like Dollfuss a man of courage, seethed over the abuse at the Berghof and relit the fuse. After consulting Mussolini on March 7, who warned him he was making a mistake—“C’é un errore!”— Schuschnigg, on March 9 in Innsbruck, announced that on Sunday, March 13, a plebiscite would be held to decide, finally and forever, whether the country wished to remain a “free, independent, social, Christian and united Austria—Ja oder Nein?”41

  Twenty thousand Tyroleans had roared their approved, but Prince Starhemberg had not. “This means the end of Schuschnigg,” the ex–vice chancellor told his wife. “Let us hope it is not the end of Austria. Hitler can never allow this.”42

  Hitler was stunned. As Kerhsaw writes,

  The German government was completely taken aback by Schuschnigg’s gamble. For hours, there was no response from Berlin. Hitler had not been informed in advance of Schuschnigg’s intentions, and was at first incredulous. But his astonishment rapidly gave way to mounting fury at what he saw as a betrayal of the Berchtesgaden agreement.43

  Schuschnigg had ordered a vote in four days where Austrians would choose between Christianity and Nazism, Austria and Germany, Schuschnigg and Hitler. To Hitler, Schuschnigg had broken their Berchtesgaden agreement and bellowed a defiant “No!” to his vision of an “evolutionary solution” and eventual union of Germany with the land of his birth. Moreover, after winning the grudging backing of the socialist unions and Marxists for the plebiscite, Schuschnigg’s government believed it would sweep between 65 percent and 70 percent of the Austrian vote.44

  After the army scandals and Cabinet debacle, Hitler could not abide humiliation at the hands of Schuschnigg. Yet neither he nor the army had prepared for a campaign against Austria. Hitler called in General Wilhelm Keitel and told him to make ready to invade. Keitel remembered that the army had drawn up an “Operation Otto” plan in the event Otto von Habsburg attempted to regain the Austrian throne. “Prepare it!” Hitler ordered.45 When Keitel got to army headquarters, he found that Operation Otto was a theoretical study. No German army plans existed for an invasion of Austria.