Hitler

by Brendan Simms

  That same month, after long negotiations, Hitler finally agreed a concordat with the Roman Catholic Church. This guaranteed the church freedom of worship and the right to levy church taxes and to run its own affairs. Catholic schools and theological faculties remained open. The secrecy of the confessional was not challenged. In return, new bishops were required to pledge an oath of allegiance to the Reich on taking office. Most importantly, the Vatican agreed to forbid clerics not just from involvement in political parties–an academic issue by now–but from any kind of political activity. Hitler’s intention here was not just to tame the German Catholic milieu but to find a modus vivendi with the papacy as an international actor. It was as much an instrument of foreign as of domestic policy.69

  If the last vestiges of German democracy had now been eliminated, this did not mean that Hitler’s authority was absolute. The rule of law was by no means completely extinguished.70 Some judges continued to hand down impartial sentences, such as the acquittal of a number of the defendants in the Reichstag Fire trial. This event, designed to showcase the new Germany and impale the communists, turned into a public relations disaster for Hitler. Moreover, Hindenburg opposed (in the end, unsuccessfully) some of Hitler’s more extreme demands, such as the execution of Marinus van der Lubbe for what he considered treason but the president regarded as no more than an aggravated crime against property. Germany was, in effect, still a duumvirate headed by Hitler and Hindenburg and would remain so for another year.

  Thanks to the enabling law, however, Hitler now had more than enough power to press ahead with his programme at home and abroad, so long as he retained Hindenburg’s support. The main focus of his domestic programme was the closely connected questions of rearmament and reducing unemployment, which ran at 6 million people, some 34 per cent of the entire labour force.71 In early April 1933, Hitler appointed the Nazi stalwart Fritz Reinhardt, who had written so passionately about the dangers of German emigration in the early 1930s, as state secretary in the Finance Ministry. Over the next few years, Reinhardt rolled out several programmes which bore his name designed to tackle the problem of unemployment and to provide labour for rearmament.72 These aimed to generate employment through public works, especially major infrastructural projects, such as the long-planned construction of motorways, and direct support for housing repairs and renovations. The best way of getting the German people back to work, Hitler announced to an audience of motorway workers, was by ‘setting the German economy in motion again’ through ‘monumental works’.73 These programmes, and Hitler’s vast expenditure on armaments, were largely paid for by Schacht’s dubious ‘MEFO bills’, in effect a system of deferred payments, drawn on a front (state) company. The actual number of jobs thereby created seems to have been extremely modest; nor did they much boost business confidence, at least at first, but they did enable Hitler to change the broader narrative.74

  No doubt in order to showcase the new mood, Hitler made a big fuss of the return of the List Regiment veteran Ignaz Westenkirchner from the United States in the autumn of 1933.75 He had emigrated in 1928, the same year as Hitler’s Second Book had warned about the exodus of Germans across the Atlantic, but had failed to make his way in Reading, Pennsylvania. Westenkirchner thus epitomized one of the problems Hitler was most concerned about. On being approached by his old comrade, the Führer paid for his passage home. Westenkirchner was given a job with the Völkischer Beobachter and pictures of him joshing with Hitler and Amann were published in various magazines and books.76 The prodigal son had returned home. Not long afterwards, Hitler repeated the exercise when he covered the fare of the dressmaker Anton Karthausen and his family, which had failed to make its way in Brownsville, Texas.77 These were, of course, primarily symbolic moves, widely reported not only in the German but also in the American press, designed to damage the narrative of the American dream.78 Hitler was not yet ready to promote the large-scale return of recent German emigrants, still less of German-Americans, to the Reich. In fact, despite his well-documented concern with German-Americans in the 1920s, he now showed little interest in the activities of his sympathizers in the United States,79 almost certainly in order to avoid provoking Washington.

  Both public works and rearmament required massive deficit financing, in effect the printing of money to pay workers and stimulate demand. Although fundamentally ‘socialist’ in outlook and politics when it came to the economy, however, Hitler did not nationalize industry. In fact there were large-scale privatizations during the first five years or so of his regime, not for ideological reasons, but to raise cash quickly by flogging off distressed enterprises.80 What Hitler did very effectively was to nationalize German industrialists, by making them instruments of his political will. Control, not ownership was the key. The major German economic institutions, especially industry, business and the banks, were completely sidelined from decision-making.81 Unlike the Reichswehr, they were not let into any secrets about Lebensraum, at least at the beginning. They were simply told what to do, and if they jibbed were threatened with imprisonment, expropriation or irrelevance.

  Hitler’s initial focus on work creation followed, rather than contradicted, his axiomatic primacy of foreign policy. He had long regarded the raising of the German standard of living as a central front in the struggle for the survival of the Reich on the international stage. Here you needed butter, not guns; of this, more presently. The Autobahns–ostensibly ‘civilian’–had a clear military purpose as well. Besides, rearmament required a steady flow of raw materials. Some of these, such as coal, were available at home, or in the case of oil and rubber could be produced synthetically, albeit at considerable cost; Hitler encouraged IG Farben, for example, to press ahead with the mass production of oil derived from the hydrogenation of coal.82 Until then, however, much of what was needed had to be purchased abroad with hard currency, which in turn had to be paid for through exports, or exchanged for German goods.83 ‘We know’, Hitler conceded, that the lack of raw materials ‘does not permit complete autarchy for our Reich’. He therefore emphasized ‘over again’ that the government was not hostile to exports, not least because these ‘fed’ so many Germans, by paying for the import of foodstuffs.84 Moreover, Hitler was well aware that the Reichswehr was initially unable to absorb more than a fraction of the financial resources available to it from January 1933.85 Investing more money in rearmament before the ground was ready would have been akin to pouring a bucket of water on parched soil.

  Now reasonably secure at home, Hitler turned his attention to the world around him. He was still preoccupied by the danger of a Franco-Polish preventive war, and there were also intelligence reports of a possible Russo-Polish rapprochement.86 Some sort of intervention to enforce the terms of the Versailles Treaty was indeed discussed in Warsaw, though it found no favour among the French.87 Hitler sought to prevent the diplomatic isolation of Germany which a Franco-Polish attack would require. Central to this endeavour was improving relations with the western powers, France, Britain and the United States. In February 1933, the Führer told Ribbentrop–who headed a special office on foreign policy–of his desire for better relations with London.88 Over the next three years, Hitler also paid greater attention to Paris than before or after.89 With the exception of a brief interlude during the Ruhr Crisis of 1923, and a few unflattering comments in Mein Kampf, he had largely ignored France, but for the first three years after the takeover of power she posed the most immediate military threat. For this reason, Hitler went out of his way to stress, more or less truthfully, his lack of interest in the return of Alsace-Lorraine.

  Hitler also protested, this time entirely disingenuously, his pacifist intentions more generally. ‘The German people,’ he claimed during his speech on the enabling law, ‘wants to live in peace with the world.’90 In this context, the war veteran card proved particularly effective. When the British conservative opponent of Nazism Duff Cooper claimed that the Third Reich was preparing for war, Hitler countered by saying that ‘we leader
s of the National Socialist movement are almost without exception former frontline soldiers’, adding that he did not think that anybody who had experienced the war would be ‘enthusiastically preparing’ for a new conflict.91 He also trod carefully on rearmament. Hitler reminded the cabinet ‘that we need to show restraint with rearmament’.92 His success here owed much to the fact that the Reichswehr had been engaged in such deception more or less since its founding and to the existence of ready-formulated plans for rearmament and conscription among its leadership.93 The Führer rebuked the DNVP leader Alfred Hugenberg for speaking openly of the return of colonies and the acquisition of Lebensraum; Hugenberg flounced out of the cabinet in a huff. The purpose of Hitler’s strategy was simple: to gain time so that he could throw off the mask later when he was ready. ‘I am pursuing a policy of understanding,’ Hitler explained to the Reichsstatthalter, ‘in order to enable a later policy of strength.’94

  An important part of Hitler’s charm offensive towards the rest of the world, especially the west, was his championship of the Olympic Games. These were scheduled to take place in Berlin in 1936, a location chosen sometime before Hitler’s rise to power. Hitler made clear that the Third Reich would not only host the event, but lay on the most spectacular Olympic Games in history. Hitler evidently hoped to showcase his achievements in front of a global audience whose very presence would legitimize his regime. In order to head off a threatened boycott, however, he had to promise that he would respect the inclusivity of the Olympic charter and welcome ‘competitors of all races’ to Berlin. While insisting that they reserved the right to determine the composition of the German team themselves, the Nazis even conceded that Jews could compete for the Third Reich.95

  At the same time, and without any sense of contradiction, Hitler sought to bluff the west into thinking that rearmament, in reality a slow and complicated process, was much further advanced than it actually was.96 This was designed to deter any preventive strike. Central to this strategy was bigging-up the German air force. The parallels with the Kaiser’s plan to use the German high seas fleet as a deterrent against Britain were so obvious that the Luftwaffe became known as a ‘risk air force’,97 not yet big enough to devastate Europe perhaps, but sufficiently powerful to raise the costs of outside intervention. In this endeavour, Hitler was extremely successful. He was able to tap into widespread elite and popular hysteria about the likelihood of mass civilian casualties from air raids. Serious expansion of the Luftwaffe began only in 1934, and it became a formidable tactical fighting force only from 1938, but the German air force exerted a hold over the British and French imaginations almost from the very beginning.

  The same caution characterized Hitler’s early policy towards the Soviet Union. To be sure, he broke off the military cooperation which the Reichswehr had pursued since the early 1920s,98 and he resisted all suggestions from the conservative right, including elements within the Foreign Office, that Germany should ally with Russia against Poland and the west. The Soviet Union, in fact, was generally not a high priority at this time, and Hitler regarded it as an ideological but not a military danger.99 That said, Hitler wanted to keep the lines to Moscow open. This was partly in order to maintain the supply of raw materials from the Soviet Union; partly because he hoped Moscow might help restrain Warsaw from launching a pre-emptive attack on Germany; and partly in order to lull the Soviets into a false sense of security. In more or less the same breath Hitler continued to attack ‘Marxism as an ideology of decomposition’ and its ‘international apostles’,100 while at the same time signalling publicly that he was ready for ‘friendly’ relations with the Soviet Union; the battle against German communism, Hitler added, was simply a ‘domestic affair’.101 It is a measure not merely of the Soviet capacity for self-deception, but also of Hitler’s ability to dissimulate, that he built up over the next eight years the level of rapport necessary to achieve both tactical and strategic surprise over Stalin.

  Hitler sought to avoid provoking Germany’s neighbours unnecessarily. One of the potential areas of contention was the millions of Germans living beyond the borders of the Reich, but within Europe. Hitler regarded them with considerable ambivalence. As we have seen, he had always been much more interested in Germans who had headed west, especially those emigrating to the United States. Despite what happened from 1938, Hitler did not primarily regard ethnic Germans in Europe as a fifth column for the Third Reich. In some cases, in particular the Germans of South Tyrol, they were actually a barrier to his planned alliances. He also feared that they might be taken ‘hostage’ by hostile powers. For this reason, Hitler told representatives of Germans abroad, he would use a ‘hammer’ at home, but ‘pincers’ in foreign policy. Volkstumspolitik was delegated to Hess, a clear signal that he did not consider it Chefsache. Hess, explicitly quoting Hitler, laid down that German minorities should ‘maintain the best possible relations with their respective host people’.102 Many ethnic Germans outside the Reich, who had expected a more robust policy right away, were bitterly disappointed with this attitude.

  There were only two exceptions. One was Austria, where the population was mainly German, there were many supporters of unification–Anschluss–with Germany and a strong Nazi party. They were under severe pressure, not so much from the left as from the locally dominant conservative clerical elites led by Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. Hitler planned to settle the Austrian question sooner rather than later. He feared the influence of ‘Viennese Half-Jewry’ and the (Habsburg) ‘legitimists’; his concerns about Habsburg restorationist tendencies extended well beyond Vienna to Hungary and some other successor states of the old Dual Monarchy. Hitler therefore recommended to the cabinet that ‘the same method be applied against Austria’ which had led to ‘immediate success’ in Bavaria.103 Vienna got its retaliation in first, however, and banned the Austrian NSDAP in June 1933. The number of Austrian Nazi exiles–already substantial–increased. Some of them were corralled into the ‘Austrian Legion’, a paramilitary force based in a camp at Lechfeld close to the Austrian border. It was tasked, as Hitler told the head of the Austria SA, Obergruppenführer Reschny in the summer of 1933, with supporting the local party ‘in the event of a rising’. No date was set, however, and no further action taken.104

  The other neighbouring state to which the Nazis were hostile from the start, and in which they took a keen interest in the very significant German minority from a very early stage, was Czechoslovakia. When relations with Poland improved, there was no attempt to extend the thaw to the Czechs. Hitler’s attitude to the Czech people at this point is unclear but he made no secret of his contempt for the Czechoslovak state, which he regarded as nothing more than a Franco-Russian thorn in the side of the Reich. In a meeting with the Hungarian foreign minister Gömbös in the summer of 1933, Hitler signalled his intention to ‘liquidate’ Czechoslovakia.105 That said, for the first four years or so of his rule the Führer took relatively little interest in what was happening in Czechoslovakia.106

  Instead, Hitler began to explore the possibility of a rapprochement with Poland. In the short term, this would enable him to break the ring of encirclement around Germany and forestall a preventive war. Strategically, a Polish alliance would provide him with a partner or at least staging ground for the pursuit of Lebensraum further east. Such a policy ran contrary to established opinion in the army and the Foreign Office, where conservatives preferred the Russian Bolsheviks to the Polish upstarts. Neurath, for example, insisted that an improvement of relations with Poland was neither possible nor desirable, and he repeatedly argued that Warsaw could only be restrained by maintaining the connection to Moscow. Hitler, by contrast, signalled a change of course on Poland very early on. This became evident when the matter of subsidies for the loss-making Gruben und Hüttenwerke IG Kattowitz, which now lay in Poland, but had formerly been part of German Upper Silesia, came up for discussion in cabinet. These had long been paid in order to maintain the German interest in the area. Hitler, departing from his usua
l mantra of the primacy of politics over economics, laid down clearly that ‘the whole matter should be viewed purely from the perspective of its financial benefits, irrespective of ‘military considerations’.107 It was eventually sold off to a Polish consortium.

  More generally, Hitler wanted not just to forestall outside intervention, but also to secure at least the benevolent neutrality of Anglo-America, and alliances with Italy and other like-minded powers. Hitler, and the Nazis generally, seem at first to have been hopeful that they could appeal to the ‘better’–that is racist–nature of the United States. They saw in Roosevelt’s America a cognate polity, not merely because of its policies of racial exclusion–in which immigration legislation weighed much more heavily than segregation–but because the ‘New Deal’ seemed to chime with what Hitler was trying to achieve in Germany.108

  There was some American sympathy for the new Germany, but from the start Hitler struggled to get his message across in the United States.109 He was irritated by the widespread and unexpected criticism of his racial policies in the American press. In remarks to the Imperial Commission for the associations of leading German medics, Hitler argued that the Americans had ‘the least excuse’ to protest because they had been ‘the first to draw practical and political conclusions from… the different value of different races’. He claimed, alluding to the 1924 immigration legislation, that these laws had already prevented the entry of ‘so-called Jewish refugees from Germany’.110 The gulf became evident in the spring of 1933, when two Americans involved in the Geneva Disarmament Conference, Allen Dulles and its chairman, Roosevelt’s close associate Norman Davis, met Hitler in the Chancellery. Ominously for him, the encounter took place in the context of rising US concerns over anti-Semitic agitation. The meeting got off to a bad start when Hitler asked how the post-bellum American South would have felt if it had been confronted like Germany with a treaty designed to keep it in permanent subjection. Davis responded that the South had been treated much worse than Germany because it had even been forced to accept black judges. He showed no sympathy at all with Hitler’s longstanding fear of Germans being enslaved by other whites, or indeed the Jews. Davis then went on to express profound concern about German rearmament. It was a complete non-meeting of minds between American and Nazi racism.111