Hitler

by Brendan Simms

  The consequences of the May crisis reverberated throughout 1938, and in many ways until the outbreak of war the following year. What Hitler had for some time suspected now seemed irrefutable. It was the difference between sensing British hostility during the November 1937 meeting in the Reich Chancellery and knowing it after May 1938. London had thrown off the mask. Britain was prepared to go to war to stop Hitler’s planned continental expansion before it had even begun. Moreover, British rearmament was now well underway and, taken together with military expenditure in the Dominions, the Empire already had the largest defence budget in the world.60 Together with that of France, its potential would soon dwarf that of the German Reich in its current borders. To make matters worse, the enmity of the United States at some point in the future was not only certain, as his ambassador in Washington constantly warned, but would be preceded by the gradual increase in her military power. The American plans ‘are clear on one thing’, Hitler’s usually optimistic military attaché in the United States reported in late May 1938 in the context of the May crisis, ‘that the winning of time in an industrial mobilization is a basic factor’.61 The question was always ‘time’, not whether but when the German Reich would again confront the United States.62

  For Hitler, too, time was the crucial variable. If it had speeded up markedly since the autumn of 1937, late May 1938 saw another step change. This was reflected in his rhetoric throughout the summer: ‘there must be no problem’, he announced on 22 May 1938, ‘that we do not solve ourselves’.63 ‘It is not the National Socialist way,’ Hitler remarked three weeks later, ‘to leave to posterity the execution of tasks which are already foreseeable.’64 Where Hitler had once said that he was merely starting a long process, he was now unmistakably indicating his determination to finish it.

  The Führer no longer believed in an understanding with Britain. He became increasingly sceptical about the value of ‘go-betweens’ and tried personally to regulate the political interaction of Germans with the outside world more generally. He decreed that he did not want German bureaucrats to make ‘official visits’ to ‘the missions of foreign states’ in the Reich, because this would give them a ‘source of information’ independent of the Foreign Office. Hitler also wanted closer superintendence of ‘personal relations’ between German officials and foreigners, the content of which should be reported in writing. Two months later, he laid down that the ‘invitations of important foreign personalities by state and party authorities’ required his permission in ‘every case’. As the year drew to a close, Hitler would go several steps further. He told Lammers that he wanted laws to ensure that ‘marriages between German citizens and those who did not possess German citizenship’ were to be ‘forbidden in principle’.65 Exceptions could only be made by the Führer himself in special cases. This was not a racially motivated measure, because the necessary legislation already existed, but a security-driven one. Across the board, Hitler was pulling down the shutters on the Third Reich.

  The Führer now began to prepare Germany for a showdown with Britain. He shifted his rhetoric from admiration of the British to condemnation of their decadence. The Nazi press increasingly portrayed the British as degenerate, effeminate, technologically backward, superannuated and susceptible to Jewish manipulation. Hitler echoed these sentiments.66 ‘Don’t talk to me about the English [sic],’ he told Wiedemann, ‘that is a decadent nation, which won’t fight any more.’67 Such statements have often been misunderstood, confusing cause and effect. Hitler’s growing antipathy to Britain was genuine, as was his anxiety about Jewish influence there, but it was driven not by his belief in her weakness and pliability, but rather by his fear of British power and intentions. Hitler was whistling in the wind, to keep up the spirits of his collaborators and perhaps his own as well. The more frightened he was, the louder he whistled.

  A clear sign of Hitler’s concern about the western powers was his decision to strengthen the western defences of the Reich so that he would have his flanks free to strike south-east and then east. The Führer had long planned some sort of barrier, but the May crisis injected a completely new sense of urgency. At the meeting with the military leadership on 28 May 1938, he gave verbal instructions that the German border from Aachen to Basel should be fortified with the help of the Labour Service and Todt’s men by October in time for the planned assault on Czechoslovakia. Further details followed three weeks later.68 Not long after, on the first day of July 1938, Hitler penned a long memorandum on the state of Germany’s fortifications, east and west. His fascination with detail, much of it drawn from his First World War experience, was a portent of his behaviour in the coming conflict. So was concern with psychological factors, especially his fear that fortifications might serve as ‘protection’ for those who ‘did not [want] to fight’ and his belief that victory could never be won through the ‘purely passive means of protection’, but only through the ‘offensive use of weapons’. Finally, it was clear that the main threat now came from the west. ‘If four or five years ago the political situation made it advisable to concentrate the then available defensive capacity primarily against Poland,’ Hitler wrote, ‘the current political considerations and necessities require the strongest concentration of all defensive capacity towards the west.’69

  The May crisis also led Hitler to reconsider his armaments policy.70 He now wanted more of everything, and he wanted it even faster than before. The army was to be ready for action by April 1939, a full year earlier than the original target date. It was to store ammunition for three months of fighting. More than half of the workforce devoted to aircraft was allocated to the construction of the Junkers 88, a medium-range bomber, whose main intended function was operations against the Western Allies.71 Hitler instructed his naval adjutant, Captain von Puttkamer, to tell Raeder to speed up the enlargement of the Kriegsmarine. He wanted the navy to bring forward the construction of two battleships to spring 1940; to speed up that of another two; to prepare more dry docks for capital ships; to build all the submarines allowed under the London agreement as soon as the order was given; to build a large number of smaller craft; and to sort out the resulting labour requirements with Göring. The reason for these measures, as Raeder told a hastily convened meeting in the Oberkommando der Kriegsmarine on 25 May 1938, was the foreign political situation, according to which the Führer had to reckon on France and Britain being on the side of the enemies.72 The following month, the navy operations staff was tasked with working out a strategy against Britain. One way or the other, Hitler now thought that war with Britain was not only possible, but likely and perhaps close.

  This meant that Hitler urgently needed to strengthen his global alliances, with a view to raising the costs for Anglo-America around the world. In particular, the Führer wanted to end the Russo-Japanese antagonism, which had already exploded into open warfare, and was to escalate still further. He met with the German ambassador to Tokyo, Eugen Ott, in early June 1938. ‘Hitler expanded on the possibility of a war with England,’ Ott recalls. ‘In spite of his conciliation in the question of naval restriction the British would oppose stubbornly the necessary expansion of the German Lebensraum to the east.’ The Führer therefore looked to Rome and Tokyo for help. ‘Then he asked,’ the ambassador continues, ‘whether I thought it possible that Japan could be induced to slacken her tense relations with Russia and to turn against the British Empire.’73 For the first time, Hitler also began to give serious consideration to encouraging anti-colonial movements within the British Empire, something which the left of the party, and many others within the Nazi hierarchy, had been advocating for some time. Criticism of Nazi repression was countered with attacks on British imperial crimes, past and present. German and international audiences were reminded of the incarceration of Boer civilians in concentration camps, an old chestnut of Hitler’s from the 1920s.74 It is striking that the Nazis justified their own measures not with reference to the Soviet Union–the Gulag was not much on their radar–but to the British Empire.


  Another priority was sorting out the widening gulf with the armed forces since the start of the year. Here Hitler had two main concerns and they were closely connected in his mind. First, as a result of the Blomberg–Fritsch crisis, he believed that the army leadership was politically at odds with Nazism, defeatist, socially and culturally detached from social realities, and in some cases morally depraved. Hitler frequently described them as a ‘caste of particularly snotty Junker blockheads… full of sterile unfruitfulness, bereft of ideas and cowardly’.75 Secondly, the events of the May crisis, especially military resistance to the planned attack on Czechoslovakia, which many expected would lead to war with the west, made Hitler doubt the robustness of his generals. This impression was confirmed by Beck’s continued criticism of the decision to attack Czechoslovakia. In mid July 1938, he demanded the collective resignation of the generals to force Hitler to change course. When this did not happen, Beck himself resigned a month later. Hitler–who was kept informed of Beck’s opposition76–increasingly saw the Wehrmacht leadership as cowardly and obstructive, and looked around for alternative military providers. SS units had already participated in the Austrian operation in March, and in August 1938 Hitler decreed that the SS-Verfügungstruppe was ‘a standing armed force’, separate from both the army and the police, and to be used as part of the Wehrmacht in times of war. Later (in April 1940) the various SS military formations became the ‘Waffen-SS’.77

  The shift to confrontation also had a profound effect on Hitler’s racial policy. Eliminating the supposedly negative and accentuating the allegedly positive became more urgent, but there was less time to achieve it. Racial cohesion would be needed to fight the war, but the war would kill the ‘best’, and spare the worst. So racial time had to be speeded up, and corners cut. The task facing Hitler was now the racial equivalent of Stalin’s forced industrialization. Unlike Britain, which had industrialized over many decades, the Soviet Union sought to do so in the space of a few years. Likewise, unlike the British Empire, National Socialism could not afford the luxury of the evolutionary racial development and toughening over the centuries.78 Over the next five years, therefore, slow extrusion gave way to rapid extermination. This had paradoxical effects. On the one hand, negative eugenics could be pursued quickly and brutally through exclusion and ultimately annihilation. On the other hand, because the slow ‘elevation’ of racial quality over time was no longer possible, positive eugenics became more inclusive as Hitler had to make do with what he had.

  In the summer of 1938, therefore, Hitler escalated the war against the Jews still further. This was primarily a reaction to his sense of external threat, which had been further heightened by the May crisis. Right at the end of that month, Goebbels revived his idea of an ‘anti-Jewish’ operation for Berlin, originally slated to begin after the Führer’s return from Italy. Hitler agreed, and the police chief, Count Helldorf, was instructed to turn up the pressure on the Jewish community.79 He specifically requested, and here the connection to the Czech crisis was evident, that ‘anti-social and criminal Jews’ should be conscripted for ‘important movements of earth’, that is, the construction of the Westwall. 80 Two weeks later, with Hitler’s express approval, the police launched a series of raids on the Jewish community in Berlin, provoking widespread protests from foreign embassies and consulates, especially the American and British ones, as their nationals were caught up in the arrests. After four days, they suddenly stopped. ‘The decision to end the operation,’ Franz Alfred Six of the ‘Security Service’ wrote in his final report on the operation, ‘is said to have been taken on the personal intervention of the Führer.’ Hitler appears to have done so for foreign political reasons.81 He had made his point. The outside world, especially Anglo-America, should be in no doubt of his determination to retaliate against German Jewry.

  To Hitler, Anglo-American humanitarian outrage about his treatment of the Jews was simply further evidence of their power in Britain and the United States. There were plenty of people who reinforced him in this view. In the summer of 1938, the SS officer Rolf Mühlinghaus was permitted to report in person to the Führer on his experiences at Oxford (Exeter College). The drift of his remarks was that the complete ‘Jewification’ of the British establishment prevented an objective view of developments in Germany.82 In the autumn of 1938, the German military attaché in Washington, Boetticher, who was passing through Berlin, briefed Hitler on the way in which Nazi policies towards the Jews were antagonizing US opinion, even among those who would otherwise be sympathetic. The Führer professed to agree, and promised to show restraint.83 On the one hand, he wanted to signal to the United States that he would hold the Jews hostage for American behaviour. On the other hand, he wanted to avoid precipitating a showdown with the US, at least until he was ready. Tragically, Roosevelt’s hostility to Hitler and his defence of the Jews, however limited the help he gave in practice, endangered them even more than they already were at that stage.

  At the same time, Hitler inferred from the unwillingness of other countries to take in the Jews an endorsement of his own position. This each way bet was epitomized by Hitler’s attitude to the Evian conference in July 1938, which Roosevelt called in order to discuss how the democracies might distribute the burden of Jewish refugees more fairly.84 Hitler refused to participate, and when the conference broke up without any British, American or western European offers to take in more Jewish immigrants (only a few Latin American countries opened their doors), his derision knew no bounds. ‘They expect,’ Hitler remarked, ‘that Germany with 140 people per square kilometre should retain its Jews without further ado’, but that ‘the democratic world empires with only a few inhabitants per square kilometre cannot take such a burden on themselves under any circumstances. So no help, but moral [lectures]!’85 There was another, more sinister implication of Evian: there was now a question-mark over large-scale emigration as a solution to the ‘Jewish Problem’.

  In this context, Hitler sought to prevent German Jews from acting as a fifth column for the enemy, and to make them hostages for the–supposed–behaviour of international Jewry. In late July 1938, he told Goebbels that he wanted the Jews out, but would keep back a few rich ones as a bargaining counter.86 He now regarded the Nuremberg laws as ‘actually still far too humane’. Jews, he remarked in mid August 1938, might have been removed ‘from the life of the state’, but they remained strong ‘in the economy’. Historically, Hitler argued–repeating a longstanding theme–the Jews had been ‘agents of trade and finance’. On a recent trip through Munich he had asked to see the remaining Jewish shops, and had been horrified to notice that ‘they were all practically still there’. The gradual extrusion of the Jews, in other words, had not worked, or at least was not working quickly enough. Hitler announced privately that he would consider actions ‘to worsen the conditions of Jewish life through additional legislation to such an extent that the bulk of the Jewish population of Germany simply no longer wanted to stay. That was the best way of getting rid of them.’87

  Meanwhile, Hitler kept up the pressure to cleanse German art of ‘noisy Dadaists, Cubist plaster-moulders and Futurist canvas-colourers’, and at the opening of the Second Great German Art Exhibition in mid July 1938 praised the nineteenth century as a model instead. This posed a problem for Nazi art, because, unlike Italian fascism, it never really developed a ‘modernistic’ style of its own. Hitler managed to generate a lively market in contemporary art, keeping prices up through his own purchases and making his preferences known.88 Few of its products, with the exception perhaps of the sculptures of Arno Breker, were later judged to be of much lasting value. Hitler seems to have sensed this, but he thought contemporary mediocrity a price worth paying to eliminate the excrescences of modernism and ensure the pre-eminence of ‘timeless’ artistic worth. That said, Hitler was clear that in the field of culture the ‘warm-up time always had to be greater’.89 It was the old problem: eliminating the negative could be done relatively quickly, but accentuati
ng the positive took time.

  Sometimes, the two could be done simultaneously. In August 1938, for example, Hitler swopped ‘degenerate art’ for Italian old masters via the international art market. This strategy was of a piece with his broader vision. Demographically, Hitler wanted to reverse what he regarded as the disadvantageous trend of the past century, when Germany had sent high-value emigrants to the United States and received supposedly inferior immigrants from eastern Europe. In the same way, Hitler wanted to cleanse German Art of degenerate elements which could be exchanged for pieces of genuinely high artistic merit. His concern, in short, was political as much as aesthetic. ‘Painting and sculpture,’ Hitler explained, ‘often reflected political circumstances.’ Roman and Greek art, he continued, had long reflected the grandeur of these civilizations, while even the better pieces produced during their decline had been transparently homosexual. Hitler averred that he would never tolerate such degeneracy in Germany.90

  The international comparison was also to the fore in Hitler’s insistence on the rapid completion of the new Imperial Chancellery. He wanted a grand building which would represent the might of the Third Reich in time for the New Year’s reception of foreign diplomats. At the topping-out ceremony in early August 1938, Hitler looked back at the speed with which the work was progressing and remarked that ‘this is no longer an American tempo, this is already the German tempo. This is the first time we have shown the world how to do it and that is good.’ Once again, the American tempo was the one to beat, and Hitler meant this more generally as well. His very next sentence referred to the crucial Lebensraum question. ‘We are an overpopulated state,’ he explained, ‘our viability requires greater efforts.’ This meant, Hitler concluded, ‘that we must also increase the pace politically’.91

  Time and space, in short, remained at the centre of Hitler’s thinking. While time was running out, there was still a window of opportunity. ‘In politics,’ he told an audience of generals at the Artillery School in Jüterborg in mid August 1938, ‘one must believe in the Goddess of Fortune who only passes once and one must grasp her then! She will never return’.92 Hitler was about to roll the dice again.