Hitler

by Brendan Simms

  Six weeks after penning his memorandum, Hitler appointed Göring the general plenipotentiary for the implementation of the Four Year Plan with a mandate to effect ‘the unified direction of all the strength of the German people and the tight concentration of all relevant agencies in party and state’. 154 Göring became, at least in name, the economics and mobilization tsar of the Reich. In a fit of energy he convened meetings, issued decrees and generally sought to convey an increased dynamism to the civil administration, the military leadership and the captains of German industry. Across the board, investment in plant, raw materials and labour was stepped up.155 All residual economic rationality was abandoned.156 The message was clear: Hitler wanted Germany to be ready, if not for war, then at least for confrontation by the early 1940s.

  In this context, the Olympic Games in Berlin, which opened amid much fanfare in August 1936, were even more important to the international position of the Third Reich. They began with the Olympic relay, an invention of the Nazis. On 20 July 1936 Greek maidens in skimpy serge frocks handed over the flame as it began its journey towards Berlin.157 The whole ceremony, which was filmed by Leni Riefenstahl, was designed to emphasize the links between Nazi Germany and Ancient Greece. The entire proceedings were broadcast by radio through the massive Olympia-Weltsender Berlin, a station capable of reaching forty countries. The American team, which included blacks and Jews, was given a particularly rousing (calculated) official and (spontaneous) popular reception. The press were under strict instructions from Goebbels not to offend the sensitivities of the visitors, especially people of colour. There were some awkward moments, for example when the black athlete Jesse Owens won the 100 and 200 metre races, the relay race and the long jump. Leni Riefenstahl celebrated his achievements on camera, though she did not film the Germans formed in long queues in pursuit of an autograph. Contrary to myth, Hitler did not refuse to congratulate Owens. Having been upbraided by Olympic officials for shaking hands with some victors early in the games, he had decided not to meet anyone. Moreover, Owens, despite his reservations about the regime, offered a salute during the conferral of his medal. During the US presidential election campaign later that year, when Owens backed the Republican candidate against Roosevelt, he even praised Hitler as ‘a man of civility’.158

  The Berlin Olympics were by any standards a triumph for Hitler.159 In his speeches and welcoming words he had addressed not merely a German but a world audience. The presence of so many foreign athletes and visitors legitimated the regime and by extension its many acts since 1933, especially the recent remilitarization of the Rhineland. ‘The foreign press [reporting] on the Olympic Games is fantastic’, Goebbels claimed, ‘everything is going like clockwork. A big success.’160 There was no attempt on his life. The only serious security breach was the ‘kiss ambush’ when a Californian woman managed to kiss the Führer.161 There were no serious racial incidents. To cap it all, the German team won the most medals, although outclassed by the Americans, especially blacks, in the athletics events.

  In Bayreuth, Hitler continued his diplomatic efforts during the second half of the festival, which resumed after the Olympic Games. There, Unity and Diana Mitford were constantly in Hitler’s presence, partly because he enjoyed their company but mainly in order to facilitate communication with the British establishment as the Führer conceived it. Eager to consolidate relations with the new pro-German monarch, Hitler even offered a bespoke production of his Lohengrin in Covent Garden to Edward VIII as a coronation present. Crushingly, the king–who appears to have been no fan of Wagner–accepted only on condition that he would not have to attend himself, and the space available at Covent Garden for the production was much too small anyway. Undeterred, Hitler suggested a Gastspiel of the Berliner Staatsoper in the British capital, followed by one of the London Philharmonic Orchestra in Germany, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham, the head of Covent Garden and a man believed to be close to Edward VIII.162 Despite some preparatory visits and correspondence, nothing came of these plans, but they illustrated not only Hitler’s determination to use what he took to be the inside track in British politics and society to secure an alliance, but also the high value he attached to cultural diplomacy. If the Kaiser had dreamed of joint Anglo-German fleet reviews held in an atmosphere of friendly rivalry, the Führer seems to have envisaged Tannhäuser-style singing contests in a similar spirit.

  In late August and early September, Hitler’s pursuit of Britain reached a climax. Lord Lloyd, whom Ribbentrop identified as a member of the ‘diehard Churchill Group’, was invited to the party rally in order to create ‘a breach’ in the ‘ranks of the hostile front of [British] right-wing conservatives’.163 So were a number of other ‘important Britons’ who were entrusted to the care of Rosenberg.164 David Lloyd George, Germany’s nemesis in the First World War, was received by Hitler at Berchtesgaden in early September. It was an amicable meeting, at which the former prime minister expressed support for the Third Reich and admiration for its programme of motorway construction. Lloyd George also presented the Führer with a signed photograph of himself bearing the inscription ‘To Chancellor Hitler, in admiration of his courage, his determination and his leadership’. He subsequently wrote that Hitler was a ‘born leader of men’ and ‘a magnetic, dynamic personality with a single-minded purpose, a resolute will and a dauntless heart’. He did not believe Hitler had any aggressive intent and thought that ‘the establishment of a German hegemony in Europe which was the aim and dream of the old pre-war militarism, is not even on the horizon of Nazism’.165

  At a reception in Nuremberg a few days later, Hitler signalled that he was prepared to settle his colonial demands ‘on the basis of mutual cooperation’ and ‘a closer understanding with Great Britain’. Hitler’s real concern, it was clear to his interlocutors, was not the colonies but Germany’s shortage of foodstuffs and raw materials and–so they thought–

  ‘securing Europe against the Bolshevik assault’. Noting that the British themselves needed colonies in order to ‘feed their population’, he asked whether they had found ‘some other way’ of doing so despite ‘the lack of raw materials’. If so, Hitler continued, they should ‘please send him the formula’. All this, he averred, was ‘no imperialism, but a question of survival for Germany’, and was motivated not by the desire ‘to disturb the strategic lines of communication of the British Empire’, but, ‘on the contrary’, driven by a desire to ‘avoid’ any such clash ‘at all costs’.166 Hitler did not spell out his proposed bargain in detail, but its general outlines were clear: Germany would respect the global position of the British Empire in return for the freedom to secure territory in Europe.

  The autumn of 1936, with its triad of the Bayreuth Festival, the Berlin Olympics and the Nuremberg rally, was in many ways the apotheosis of the Third Reich. It had excelled itself in music, sport and political choreography. The culmination of those heady eight weeks came on the evening of 11 September, when Albert Speer’s ‘Lichtdom’, using ideas developed by others, threw a huge arc of light over the rally by means of 151 anti-aircraft searchlights, and took everybody’s breath away.167 Against this dramatic backdrop, the main speakers, Goebbels, Rosenberg and Hitler himself, their remarks closely coordinated,168 relentlessly hammered home both Germany’s rebirth and the Bolshevik threat.169 The Spanish Civil War, Hitler warned, was evidence of the activities of the ‘Jewish Revolution headquarters in Moscow’.170 ‘The party congress was the most unified so far,’ Rosenberg wrote in his diary, adding that ‘the Führer [was] happy and reinvigorated’. 171

  It is easy to see why Hitler looked back in the autumn of 1936 in satisfaction at the achievements of his first four years in office. There is no doubt that Hitler’s will moved mountains domestically. Prices were controlled in ways that defied conventional economics. Alternative sources of energy were found. The multiplier effect he had predicted before taking power initially created a virtuous circle during the first few years in which everything seemed possible. The Germany
economy had been completely revived; unemployment was close to zero. There was no significant resistance to Hitler’s authority. His domestic enemies were either dead, in prison, in exile, cowed or converted. Germany’s standing abroad and her territorial integrity had been triumphantly restored.

  None of this had been as easy as it looks in retrospect. Hitler had taken great risks and shown iron nerves. He had seen off the threat of preventive war by France and Poland. Relations with Warsaw remained good even after the death of Piłsudski, whose Berlin memorial service Hitler attended with what appears to have been genuine reverence.172 He had bounced back from a failed putsch in Austria. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Hitler saw these events as a vindication of his view that politics was primarily a matter of ‘will’. ‘Nobody,’ he told the Annual Congress of the German Labour Front in September 1936, ‘should counter me with the phrase “That will not work”!’ ‘Nobody can and should say that to me,’ he continued, ‘I am not one of those men to whom one can say “That will not work”.’ ‘It must work,’ Hitler vowed, ‘because Germany must live.’ ‘The word impossible,’ he told a meeting of leading German industrialists convened in mid December 1936 to facilitate the implementation of the Four Year Plan, ‘does not exist here’.173

  By the end of 1936, however, Hitler was reaching the limits of what could be achieved by determination alone. He could not simply will the Germans a standard of living comparable to the British and the Americans. The paramount symbol of that aspiration, the Volkswagen project, was already in trouble by the summer of 1936, because the car industry did not think it viable. Most importantly of all, the Führer could not indefinitely increase both domestic consumption and armaments production. No amount of will would secure raw materials on the world market as the Reich’s foreign currency reserves dwindled. The structure of the rest of the world’s economies failed to reconfigure to German needs. Although he believed that both guns and butter were central to his racial project, Hitler would soon have to choose between them, at least temporarily.

  In the last four months of the year, moreover, the skies darkened not merely physically, but strategically. Hitler was watching events in Austria with mounting concern. Since the failed coup two years earlier, the Führer had gone out of his way to avoid trouble there. When he heard that the Austrian SA were trying to re-establish ‘terrorist groups’, his adjutant Fritz Wiedemann let their commander, SA-Obergruppenführer Reschny, know that ‘the Führer sharply forbade any such action’.174 In the summer of 1936, he approved a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ with the Austrian chancellor Schuschnigg, drawn up by Papen with a view to improving relations through the lifting of travel and other restrictions. The problem was that Austria appeared to be drifting further out of the German orbit, with talk of her joining a ‘Danubian Pact’. Hitler regarded this scheme as a stalking horse for the thing he feared most, which was a Habsburg restoration. If this now seems implausible, one must remember that it was less than two decades after the end of the Habsburg Empire, and the dynasty still retained many supporters. Hitler’s worst fears were confirmed in the late summer, when he was told of the request of Prince Starhemberg, the leader of the conservative Austrian ‘Home Defence’ (Heimwehr) militia, to see him and to try to persuade him to support plans for a ‘restoration in Austria’ carried out with the combined support of the Heimwehr and the German nationalists.175

  Meanwhile, the confrontation with world communism loomed ever larger, as the Soviet Union shifted in Hitler’s view from largely passive victim to mortal threat. ‘The confrontation with Bolshevism is coming [and] we need to be prepared,’ Hitler told Goebbels in mid November 1936, adding, presciently, that ‘we will be completely ready by 1941’. For now, the main communist challenge lay in Spain, where the Republican government was strongly supported by Stalin. ‘Moscow seems to be committing itself very strongly in Spain,’ Goebbels reported after a meeting with Hitler in mid November, ‘but it will encounter us’, because ‘Spain must not and will not turn red’.176 ‘It was his sole objective,’ Hitler remarked shortly afterwards, ‘that Spanish foreign policy after the end of the war would be determined by neither Paris, nor London, nor Moscow’, and that therefore Spain would not be ‘in the enemy camp’, but if possible a ‘friend of Germany’, in the ‘inevitable’ confrontation over the reordering of Europe.177

  To make matters worse, the hope of a British alliance was dwindling.178 Ribbentrop sent regular warnings from London that opinion was turning against the Third Reich. ‘He talks of London,’ Goebbels noted, where there was ‘a lot of Jewish agitation [but] the king is on our side.’ A gruesome performance by Sir Thomas Beecham’s visiting London Philharmonic Orchestra, after which Hitler felt compelled to applaud ‘politely’, did not help. Hitler persisted, however, and continued to try to influence British opinion through the Mitfords, to whom he authorized payments through Goebbels. The Führer attended Oswald Mosley’s wedding to Diana Mitford in Berlin, with the dinner held at Hitler’s request at Goebbels’s house at Schwanenwerder. A month later, it was probably out of deference to Britain that he gave Epp short shrift when he broached the colonial question again.179

  Then in early December 1936, Hitler received the catastrophic news that King Edward VIII, the pro-German monarch of whom he had expected so much, was likely to abdicate. The Führer, Goebbels reported, was ‘very upset about it’.180 He ensured that the German press was gagged for the duration of the crisis as the Reich government observed events. In the course of the next month, Hitler repeatedly erupted against the ‘hypocritical’ Baldwin government and the ‘cowardice and mendacity’ of the British public.181 ‘The Führer speaks of England,’ Goebbels reported; he considered its population ‘a satiated people without ideals’. ‘The king,’ Hitler continued, ‘deserved sympathy’ because British men lacked ‘spunk’.182 On 10 December, Edward finally abdicated. Some two weeks later, Ribbentrop returned to Berlin to report. His account confirmed Hitler’s view. ‘Edward was toppled by Baldwin and the clerics,’ Goebbels wrote after discussing the matter with Hitler, ‘because he was too independent and pro-German.’ ‘Mrs Simpson,’ the two men agreed, ‘was only the pretext’; the real cause was the fact that public opinion in ‘London was completely in the hands of the Jews’.183 It was during the abdication crisis, in fact, that Hitler seems to have come to the view that Britain was beyond redemption.

  Relations with the United States were also deteriorating, though a breach was not imminent. The prevailing expectation, as expressed by a dispatch from the ambassador in Washington, Hans Luther, was that despite his rhetorical philippics against treaty-breakers and race-haters, Roosevelt would observe a policy of strict neutrality with regard to Europe. Europeans might find it ironic, Luther remarked, to hear such strictures from ‘the head of a state which had gained possession of a huge continent through wars and the breach of numerous treaties’,184 and, he might have added, had a long and continuing record of racial discrimination to boot. One way or the other, there was no getting around the fact that, as Luther warned in early October 1936, ‘our National Socialist state form is decisively rejected on principle by every American government’.185

  Meanwhile, Hitler stepped up his efforts to turn Berlin into a truly global capital. He pressed ahead with the construction of Tempelhof airport. In mid October 1936, Hitler told Albert Speer that he planned to appoint him Generalbauinspekteur with a wide-ranging remit to remodel the city as the capital of a world power on a par–implicitly–with London and Washington. Speer was allowed to draft his own job specification which gave him more or less unlimited powers to transform Berlin according to his, and the Führer’s, vision.186

  Hitler also reacted to the changing global environment by consolidating his alliances. In October 1936, he concluded an agreement with Italy which was ostensibly directed towards collaboration over the League of Nations, the Soviet threat, the Spanish Civil War, Austria, colonial matters and the Balkans. Its real target, however, was Britain. Shortly afterwards, M
ussolini referred to the alliance publicly as an ‘axis’ between Berlin and Rome.187 The Führer also sought a connection with Japan. This was an important step, for hitherto it had been an open question whether the Third Reich would ‘opt’ for Tokyo or for China, though Hitler’s own sympathies had lain with Japan for some time. In early June 1936, he met with the Japanese ambassador Count Mushakoji in Berlin, and a month later at Bayreuth with the man who was to succeed him, General Hiroshi Oshima.188 They agreed the need for a common front against the Soviet Union and world communism; neither man mentioned London or Washington. Hitler expected a new Russo-Japanese War imminently, and planned to use the opportunity to seize land from the Soviet Union.189 In early November 1936, the Third Reich and Japan signed what became known as the ‘Anti-Comintern Pact’. Over time, Hitler was to refer repeatedly to this new ‘world-political triangle’ as evidence for the fact that ‘the isolation of Germany was over’.190

  The ‘axis’ was ostensibly directed against the Soviet Union and world communism, but in truth Japan’s main enemies were the British Empire and the United States. It was in this spirit that the Führer confided to the Italian foreign minister, Count Ciano, that anti-communism was the lowest common denominator against the western powers, and also that the pact was designed to change British behaviour. A common front against the Soviet Union was thus not merely compatible with, but very much part of, the joint struggle against the western powers. ‘The Führer thinks,’ Goebbels records, that ‘the fruits of this agreement will only ripen in five years’ time. He really pursues policy in the long term.’191 This turned out to be an uncannily precise prediction, as both the German Reich and the Japan went to war together five years and one week later in 1941, not with the Soviet Union, but against the United States.